Articles – Page 22 – Religion Online

Pray as You Can (Rom. 8:26-39; Matt. 13:31-33, 44-52)

"Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness: for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words" (Romans 8:26).

I was raised in a middle-class, suburban family for whom religion, like sex, was a taboo topic. My Uncle Paul, a monastic known as Brother Leo, would join us each year for Thanksgiving dinner, but we never offered grace for the meal. Uncle Paul was an oddity in his black suit and drab, community-owned sedan. But I sensed that spiritually he was on to something -- as were my girlfriends, I thought, because they were allowed to go to Sunday school, or CCD class on Wednesday afternoons, or temple on Saturday mornings.

I was an imaginative kid. Mrs. Haiseman, my fourth-grade teacher, often sent me home with a cardboard-and-glitter plaque that declared, "I’m a Creative Writer!" I would fashion Christmas collages for my family out of holiday cards saved from previous years. I knew better than to include nativity scenes in my artworks, and stuck with bright renderings of holly, ivy, snow-drifts and Santa.

Once, coming upon a card emblazoned in golden ink with the Lord’s Prayer, I carefully cut out the prayer and slipped it between the pages of another forbidden text, The Facts of Life and Love, a mildewed book that had belonged to my mother’s parents.

It was a perplexing season in my life. Reading in secret, I would learn that undergarments were never an appropriate gift for a gentleman to give a young lady. I memorized the mysterious words, "Hallowed be thy name." I knew that I did not know how to pray, but I learned the entire Lord’s Prayer by heart and repeated it nightly, waiting for something to happen. Eventually, puberty overtook me, but that hardly seemed like an answer to prayer.

A decade later, when I was a college English major and burgeoning hipster poet, I fell in love with a classmate, a gentleman who, in the most timely and tasteful manner, gave me some undergarments as a gift. He also went to church on Sundays. I had long since given up on the God who had not answered my childhood prayers, and I mocked my boyfriends faith. I was fond of quoting punk rock icon Patti Smith: "Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine." My boyfriend asked me to knock it off.

I was jealous of his love for Jesus, and even more of Jesus’ love for him. Alone one afternoon, I put my head in my hands and said to the nothingness, "I don’t know how to do this. Teach me to pray." The Holy Spirit took it from there, interceding on my behalf with sighs too deep for words.

Yet for the next several years, through my baptism, my church wedding (yes, to the Christian who gives gifts of underwear), through my continued efforts to write poetry, and even during my first bout of seminary education, I went about my life tense with the secret that I did not know how to pray as I ought. In my purse I carried a paperback book with a title borrowed from Dom John Chapman: Pray as You Can, Not as You Can’t. What I really did not know was that my spiritual ignorance, my inexpert yearning for God, was a hidden treasure, a pinch of yeast leavening my life.

One muggy July afternoon, in a state of spiritual frustration, I took a cooling midday shower. Along with the flowing water, I felt the Spirit descend on me, and I began to understand how to pray. Not in sighs too deep for words, but in words born of silence and scripture -- and obedience, which means listening.

I opened my Bible and it spoke to me. I wrote about two dozen prayers in as many days, lucid and heartfelt, and the people of my home church distributed them to the congregation in photocopied booklets. This was not divine dictation or ecstatic writing; I was neither Muhammad nor Margery Kempe. But the experience echoes in my memory with Jesus’ words: "Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old."

What was new to me -- listening with the ear of the heart (as St. Benedict puts it) to sacred texts until they lead the listener to prayer -- was actually very old. Call it lectio divina, prayerful reading or breaking open the word. It is a practice older even than St. Benedict, who, along with St. Paul, has taught me much about prayer.

I’ve learned that we underestimate the Spirit’s power to help us in our weakness. Prayer begins not with competence but with an earache -- an ache in the ear of the heart. And prayer may take as many forms as there are pray-ers. Pray as you can, but never think you’ve got it down cold. What would we do if we truly prayed as we ought? Sweat blood? Cry Abba? Sing psalms and spiritual songs? All of this, without ceasing?

Me, I read and listen, pray and write. No, I do not know fully how to pray as I ought. But I trust that the Spirit, who deeply sighs where words leave off, intercedes for me -- and for you, and for all creation. And that is enough.

Fostering Family (Romans 8:12-25)

The other day my husband, Ken, and I splashed and swam in a pool, then ate burgers and drank iced tea at a barbecue hosted by our friends Ann Marie and Patricia. We are pleased and proud of the honorary titles "Uncle Ken" and "Auntie Rachel," bestowed on us by this couple and the children they are raising. I’m also thankful for permission to tell their story, which has taught me much about what the apostle Paul calls "a spirit of adoption."

I have a special bond with Emily, Ann Marie’s precocious and athletic six-year-old cousin. She calls me "Mini Me," and I call her "Big Me." She can already read at a second- or third-grade level. Emily’s father is largely absent from her life, and her birth mother is glad to have Ann Marie and Patricia as co-parents.

Hailey, a blond, abundantly energetic toddler, looks like a small Olympian in her blue, "USA"-emblazoned bathing suit. She laughs delightedly when I talk to her in my chipmunk voice. Ann Marie and Patricia’s friends had been praying fervently for Hailey since she was just a few months old. At that time, she disappeared with her birth mother, a young, crack-addicted woman who was trying to escape intervention by Child Protective Services. Ann Marie worked for CPS at the time, and having recently wed her partner, Patricia (in a church commitment ceremony at which I served as celebrant), she decided to become a foster co-parent to Hailey, a child with special needs stemming from the chaos of her life’s earliest months.

One and a half years of foster parenting later, Ann Marie is Hailey’s legally adoptive mother. At the adoption hearing, the presiding judge honored Patricia by expressing his hope that one day loving couples like Ann Marie and Patricia will enjoy the legal right to share in the adoption of foster children who desperately need stable, nurturing families.

Our entire society groans while we wait for just and compassionate laws that will respond to the need: according to recent American Bar Association statistics, the U.S. is home to between 6 and 10 million children of gay, lesbian or bisexual parents. The Department of Health and Human Services claims that approximately 581,000 children currently receive foster care, with about 127,000 of those children awaiting permanent, legal adoption. Thank God for parents like Ann Marie and Patricia, whose determined advocacy for children is undeterred by homophobic legislation.

Mike and Kerry waited nearly two years to adopt J. T., now two, who romps around our church’s playground with Hailey Kerry, whom J. T. calls "Daddy," is his legally adoptive father, while Mike ("Papa" to J. T.) is his loving, stay-at-home -- although not legally adoptive -- parent. During one of J. T.’s recent midday naps, Mike told me about the yearning and anxiety that he and Kerry felt while they waited hopefully to become adoptive parents of an infant. "We wait for it with patience," writes Paul of hoping "for what we do not see." Clearly, Paul never experienced the anticipation and stress of waiting to adopt a baby.

Patricia and Ann Marie are raising a third child. Abby Rose was slated to play the infant Jesus in our church’s Christmas pageant last year. But because her immune system was compromised by the cocaine her birth mother ingested during pregnancy, Abby Rose was hospitalized with a dangerous infection.

Like many parents whose children become wards of the state, Abby Rose’s birth mother has, to borrow Paul’s potent phrase, "a spirit of slavery." At 19 she became addicted to drugs, and she now lives in "bondage to decay" in a manner that Paul may never have imagined. For her, "groaning in labor pains" leads to another pain -- she loses custody of children she is incapable of raising. Ann Marie recently received a call informing her that the birth mother’s drug use had caused her to miscarry Abby Rose’s sibling.

Ann Marie’s cell phone is never silent for long. Often the calls come from the children’s services agency that once employed her as a supervisor. Just the other day, a CPS worker phoned to ask whether the two women would accept two more foster daughters, newborn twins whose birth parents had already lost their parental rights. After some difficult moments, Ann Marie declined.

What made it difficult for Ann Marie to say no is what makes her a superb parent. She understands the profundity of children’s needs, especially of those whose gestation has been toxic and whose childhood seems destined for emotional and material impoverishment. Parenting demands the highest degree of self-giving, and Ann Marie and Patricia already have one child who needs extra patience, attention and hope. Other foster parents must be found for the twin girls.

I pray that a foster family will be led to them soon, and that their joyful adoption will come in due time. As long as the twins are adored and diapered, fed and read to, held and protected and allowed safely to discover themselves and their world, it will not matter whether their foster family includes a mommy and a daddy, or some creative variation on this culture’s conventional image of family. What will matter is that the thousands of children waiting for adoption be treated, in the words of the apostle Paul, as children of God. "And not only the creation," writes Paul, "but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies." The redemption of the body of Christ surely calls for the timely and literal adoption of every child who is waiting to be wanted, accepted and loved.

The Debate on ‘Open Theism’

Theologian John Sanders lost his college teaching job recently because of his endorsement of "open theism" -- the view that the future is not determined by God. His ouster from Huntington College in Indiana followed three years of nasty debate within the Evangelical Theological Society a significant faction of which wanted to expel Sanders (along with Clark Pinnock) on the grounds that his position with respect to God’s foreknowledge was inconsistent with ETS’s adherence to biblical inerrancy.

Just what is open theism? What is at stake in the debate about it? And why has the topic elicited such passion in evangelical circles?

Open theism is grounded in a deeply pastoral concern about evil and suffering. Sanders begins The God Who Risks by recounting the death of his brother. Gregory Boyd, another proponent of open theism, closes God of the Possible with an extensive treatment of the pastoral implications of open theism in the face of tragedy. Open theism offers an answer to a longstanding question: If God is all-powerful and perfectly good and has complete knowledge of the future, how can God permit the evil and suffering we see on both global and personal levels?

If God knows that such suffering will occur, the open theist reasons, then there must be some sense in which God is responsible for such evil -- which would compromise God’s goodness. Since such a conclusion would be clearly contrary to scripture and Christian tradition, the open theist offers another account: God didn’t know.

Open theism, then, is a retooling of our understanding of God’s foreknowledge. Open theism does not, however, reject the claim that God is omniscient. Boyd states this very clearly: "The issue is not whether God’s knowledge is perfect. It is. The issue is about the nature of the reality that God perfectly knows." The question concerns what we might call the "ontological status" of the future: is the future something that exists to be known? More specifically, can the future actions of free moral agents be known before such free decisions are made?

Open theists contend that God cannot know the future of free moral agents not because God lacks the knowledge or power or cognitive ability, but because the future of such free agents does not exist as an object to be known. God does not know the sufferings that a dictator will inflict upon his people not because God’s power to know is impoverished, but simply because what such a free agent will do in the future is open, and therefore does not exist to be known. The future is blank and filled in only after choices are made.

One can anticipate an objection at this point: if God’s knowledge entails knowing that evil and suffering are at least possible, then why did God create the world? Why create a world of free moral agents if one of the possible outcomes is a world of domestic abuse and genocide?

At the heart of the open view of God is a picture of God as a risk-taker. For God, evil and suffering are necessary risks that attend the creation of free moral agents who can relate to God in love. Unlike process theologians, open theists continue to assert creation ex nihilo, creation out of nothing. Creation is not a necessary emanation that God "needs" to be complete; rather, creation is a gratuitous act done primarily out of love and for love. God freely decided to create beings capable of loving relationships, and the necessary condition of such love is freedom. And the necessary risk of such freedom is evil.

Evil and suffering, then, are contingent future possibilities, but precisely insofar as they are the effects of decisions made by free moral agents, they are part of a future that does not exist. In other words; they do not exist to be known, even by God. There are thus limits to God’s foreknowledge; these limits are not internal to God but rather stem from the nature of what there is to be known.

Despite the complaints of some evangelicals, open theism does seem to fall within the purview of catholic orthodoxy insofar as it maintains God’s omniscience and asserts that creation occurred ex nihilo. Indeed, the utter biblicism of open theism makes it a truly evangelical phenomenon. It stems from its proponents’ serious engagement with scriptural texts -- though they could also be charged with a degree of naïveté in thinking that one comes to the scriptures without a host of philosophical assumptions. (A common strategy of open theists is to denounce "classical" notions of God’s sovereignty as the product of the "Hellenization" of scriptural exegesis. Sanders and other open theists take themselves to be coming to scripture without metaphysical presuppositions.)

The open theists’ revisioning of God’s foreknowledge, like a stone dropped into a pond, has had a ripple effect across the theological spectrum, raising questions about the nature of divine providence, God’s sovereignty, prophecy and prayer, to mention a few issues. One can understand why such a radical rethinking with such broad implications would generate intense debate, particularly for evangelicals who value faithfulness to scripture and theological orthodoxy.

One of our first reactions might be to write off the whole debate as archaic and, worse yet, downright "scholastic." But there can be some virtue to such supposedly scholastic discussions. Indeed, I have found that parishioners are much more interested in "scholastic" questions than theologians are. I recall teaching at an inner-city Pentecostal church where young people were intensely interested in questions about prayer and God’s foreknowledge; these matters were important to their discipleship.

The debate over open theism laudably pushes us to consider the nature of confessional language. It also raises important questions about human freedom, and perhaps even some political questions about freedom.

Open theism pushes us to reconsider the way religious language works. Just what are we doing when we confess that God is good? Or beautiful? Or sovereign? What are we to make of the scriptures that describe God as repenting or changing his mind? Classical conceptions of God have tended to say that when scripture speaks about God "repenting" or changing in some respect, such language is metaphorical and does not properly describe God’s essence. On the other hand, when scripture asserts that God does not change, the classical tradition has thought that such language properly describes God’s essence. Open theists, in contrast, take metaphorical language seriously. (There might even be something post-liberal about open theism insofar as it seeks to let the language of scripture be that which governs the imagination.)

The underlying question is whether our language "hooks onto" God in some way. Are we really saying something about God? Or is God so wholly other that such statements never really reach their target? Is our confessional language ultimately equivocal, with no real connection between what we say and who God is? Or is God "good" in the same way that we are good? Is such language about God univocal, such that God is conditioned by a general notion of goodness external to God?

The latter, univocal notion of confessional language would seem to reduce God to little more than an idol: theology, as Ludwig Feuerbach suggested, would just be anthropology, and in all of our talk about God we would end up talking about ourselves. But the former, equivocal notion of theological language would disconnect us from any real knowledge of God, leaving us within a flattened realm where confessional language never makes it outside of the atmosphere of immanence. Ironically, then, both univocity and equivocity wind up in the same place, leaving us with religious language that merely bounces around the echo chamber of immanent reality, never being ruptured by transcendence or making its way out to transcendence.

This is why a long theological tradition, embodied especially in Augustine and Aquinas, has suggested that confessional language is neither equivocal nor univocal but operates on the basis of analogy. And both emphasized that the paradigm for understanding this was the incarnation itself, whereby the transcendent inhabits immanence, really and fully, without giving up transcendence. The Word becoming flesh, piercing that atmospheric ceiling of immanence, is that which underwrites our words about God. This means that our confessional language both "hooks onto" God and is characterized by some slippage. God is given in such language and at the same time exceeds our metaphors. God gives himself to human understanding, all the while resisting comprehension.

This translates into a confessional humility. As Augustine once explained it to his parishioners, "We are talking about God; so why are you surprised if you cannot grasp it? I mean, if you can grasp it, it isn’t God. Let us rather make a devout confession of ignorance, instead of a brash profession of knowledge." Evangelicals would do well to be reminded of such sanctified ignorance when it comes to denouncing open theism. We all would do well to take seriously the incarnational operation of language. Retrieving a sense of analogy is to confess that "in the beginning was metaphor."

A second key theme here is human freedom. Open theism is the logical consequence of an Arminian understanding of human nature, free will and the effects of sin. Indeed, open theism assumes human freedom and seeks to extend the implications of this to our understanding of God.

But what exactly does it mean to be free? Open theism, reflecting a contemporary consensus, assumes a libertarian notion of human freedom. This is what Isaiah Berlin famously described as a "negative" understanding of freedom: one is free insofar as one is free from external constraints. To be free is to be autonomous and self-determining, free to do otherwise. Freedom is freedom of choice. It is this understanding of freedom that is enshrined in liberal democracy. This construal of freedom is so deeply ingrained in our culture, and even in contemporary theology and Christian philosophy, that it’s almost impossible to think of freedom in any other way.

Open theism, assuming that humans are free in this way, constructs an account of God’s foreknowledge that attempts to reconcile claims about God’s omniscience with human freedom -- the sense that human choice creates the future as it goes. In this sense, open theism sees God as "making room" for human choice by granting space for human autonomy, even if that means that God takes the risk that we will choose badly, as we so often do.

However, there is another trajectory of thinking about freedom in the Christian tradition. Augustine emphasized a "positive" understanding of freedom as empowerment: I am free insofar as I am able to achieve the good. On this score, freedom isn’t just the ability to choose, but the ability to choose well, to choose rightly. What is valued is not autonomy, but a sense of dependence upon God -- even a participation in God as that which properly orients us to the telos that constitutes human flourishing. In this telling of the story, sin and evil result from the very desire to be autonomous, to secure one’s independence from God.

Given the complexities of this problem and the inadequacy of language, we ought to be humble about which approach we take. And we might do well to hold both models in some kind of dialectical tension.

That said, we should also be attentive to the political presuppositions that might color our theological understanding, as well as the way our theologies of freedom might translate into some surprising political policies. Could there be a sense in which open theism’s concern for human autonomy reflects an accommodation to the picture of human nature bequeathed to us by modernity, and liberal democracy in particular? Could it be that open theism, like modernity, flirts with idolizing freedom as autonomy?

Open theists think that freedom of choice is a good that warrants human suffering. But is this not to almost make freedom of choice an end in itself? Might one not, in the vein of Ivan Karamazov, suggest that creation in that case was a pretty irresponsible risk for God to take? If the price of freedom is the suffering ot children, we might conclude that freedom’s not worth the price of admission and happily return the ticket.

I can’t help reading this theological controversy within the context of our current political climate, where freedom has been enlisted as the engine that drives a hawkish foreign policy, even while it is also employed to guard a laissez-faire global economy. President Bush’s second inaugural address linked the language of freedom as the guiding principle of America’s democratic missionary calling to the theological principle that freedom is the "gift of the Almighty" to every human being.

But what concept of freedom is at work here? Clearly, the rhetoric of the current administration -- which so reveres the ideal of a free market -- is predicated on a libertarian or "negative" notion of human freedom, as is the notion of freedom assumed by open theism. (Though open theism is castigated as "liberal" by conservative critics, some of them are beholden to this same liberal notion of freedom.)

The open-theism debate could be instructive if it questions the assumption that freedom is to be understood in libertarian terms. For as David Burrell has recently shown in his book Faith and Freedom, not only are such libertarian notions of freedom contrary to a long history of theistic thought, but such a reduction of freedom plays right into the hands of capitalism’s valuing of choice for its own sake, with no concern for telos or choosing well, Perhaps open theism, in seeking to resist the static, dispassionate god of an antique metaphysics, has played into the hands of a market-driven god who is only too happy to multiply choices for the sake of consumption.

The open-theism controversy offers an opportunity to revisit fundamental questions about our confessional language and, more important, about how to understand freedom in an age in which liberty is the banner under which an empire expands. It could be that the Son who makes us "free indeed" frees us, above all, from enslavement to libertarian notions of human autonomy. That has consequences for both Christian worship and public theology.

Rearranging Mountains in Appalachia

In the summers of 1920 and 1921 southern West Virginia was the scene of some of the most historically significant unrest in U.S. history. Yet today this history has been largely forgotten. Although I was raised in West Virginia, I first learned about these events as a nearly grown man when I saw the movie Matewan, John Sayles’s cinematic vision of the seminal events of the mine wars.

In the Battle of Matewan, union coal miners fought Baldwin-Felts "private detectives" who had been hired to evict union miners from company housing. Several men died, including the mayor of the town of Matewan. Police chief Sid Hatfield (yes, of those Hatfields) became a folk hero. He was later indicted on murder charges in nearby McDowell County and shot, as they say, "in cold blood," by company detectives on the courthouse steps. This event, in combination with the imprisonment of some union organizers, led to the climactic Battle of Blair Mountain, in which union miners, having disregarded President Warren G. Harding’s demand that they return to their "homes," confronted the U.S. military.

One would think that an armed insurrection would have been prominently displayed in the West Virginia history class one takes as an eighth-grader. It was not. Which is not to say I had no idea that strange and violent things had taken place in the 50 years or so when my coal-mining grandfather was moving from abject poverty to relative prosperity. There were occasions, I was told, when it was necessary for him and others to travel to work armed with rifles. There was the time he had beaten a mine foreman to within an inch of his life for admonishing my one-armed great-grandfather for his slow pace in loading coal. And there was another time, decades later, when that same foreman showed up on my grandfather’s front porch seeking his forgiveness.

These stories, however, seem to have taken place on another planet. They are alien not only because of the nakedness and the nearness of their violence (it happened here?), but also because most of us have little experience with the kind of poverty that could produce it. More than that, the stories seem alien because we’d rather not face the history of violence which underpins our use of electricity. When any of us flips a light switch, that electricity is underwritten in part by the violence I’ve described. In other words, electricity runs on coal, but coal production runs on bygone violence. The mine wars, the schemes to deprive local Appalachians of the mineral rights to their lands (an injustice which has never been put right), workplace injustice and the struggle to right it are the constitutive violences of the coal and electric power industry.

This violent history also remains hidden because it is clothed in relative prosperity; it’s no longer naked in the way it was 80 or 90 years ago, and it’s therefore more difficult to talk about. People in Appalachia and elsewhere really are fed, clothed and sheltered well through their work in the coal mines. That’s why we don’t talk about Blair Mountain in the eighth grade.

Despite the benefits of mining to individual families, West Virginians actually benefit very little from the coal industry. Given the richness of natural resources in West Virginia and the dramatic need for those resources elsewhere, one might expect that public universities in the state would rival the Ivy League. They do not. One might also expect that the last thing such places would require is state-funded taxing of the poor in the form of gambling and lotteries to subsidize the state budget. But strangely they do. For some reason this kind of injustice remains difficult for many to see.

Recently, however, the violence of electricity production has once more become starkly visible, as it renders our experience of the landscape interplanetary. This new visibility is the product of so-called mountaintop removal methods of coal extraction. This is a relatively new process for gaining access to coal seams using "drag line" equipment, in which mountaintops are simply sliced off in a kind of radical terra-forming. This process opens up previously inaccessible coal sources but at the same time produces an enormous amount of debris, which is then disposed of through the aptly named practice of valley filling. One simply "fills in" what had previously been a stream valley. It’s hard to imagine a more intensive rearrangement of local landscapes.

Rearrangement of the land is never self-evidently evil. Scenic vistas are certainly to be valued, but one of the things that has to be resisted is a knee-jerk impulse to keep things in the natural world exactly the way they are in order to continue looking at them. That reaction entails a kind of "eco-pornographic" view of the land, in which, rather than considering the natural world the site of an interaction which produces mutual benefits (in the way farming and hunting sometimes do), we regard it simply as an image or object with which one need not take the risk of real relationship. Those relationships, whether among people or between people and land, are mutually transforming.

Mountaintop removal might seem so destructive and radically transformative of the land that it cannot qualify as part of a mutually beneficial relationship between human beings and the so-called natural world. It certainly seems that way to me, but it’s a controversial point.

Far less controversial is the idea that when such landscapes are attacked in this way, the process does violence to things other than the landscapes themselves. Those things are, invariably, human communities. Consider the Environmental Protection Agency’s assessment of the disruption:

The impact of mountaintop removal on nearby communities is devastating. Dynamite blasts needed to splinter rock strata are so strong they crack the foundations and walls of houses. Mining dries up an average of 100 wells a year and contaminates water in others. In many coalfield communities, the purity and availability of drinking water are keen concerns. Blasting and shearing mountains have added to the damage done to underground aquifers by deep mines.

It’s hard to imagine a more fundamental devastation for a community than loss of the ability to supply itself with shelter and clean drinking water. To refer to such devastation as an "environmental" problem is to miss the point. It isn’t an attack on something around human beings -- their ‘environs’ -- but an attack on the human beings themselves, one that involves them at the level of their livelihood, just like the early labor wars. In this sense, the strange violence of electricity production is once again alienating human beings from their landscapes by making those landscapes uninhabitable.

How are Christians to respond to this violence? If we claim to understand the world through the cross of Christ and to have lives shaped by the anticipation of Christ’s kingdom, how are we to confront the fact that an apparently fundamental component of our lives -- our use of electricity -- rests upon the kinds of violence that Christ refused?

Any easy answer to this question would be untruthful. With that caveat in place, I want to suggest that Christians must reject at least two temptations. On the one hand, we may regard the violence that we do to one another in the name of electric power as inevitable. We may say, ‘Well, the world’s a fallen and imperfect place. It just seems to be the case that in order for there to be indispensable good x we’re going to have to face up to suffering y."

We could give this fatalist reading of the situation a theological spin by claiming that only God can act without loss, which is just a pious admission that nobody’s perfect. Or we could give ourselves permission to engage in the violence of electricity production by saying (in the manner of Reinhold Niebuhr) that the kingdom that Christ’s life makes visible is an "impossible possibility" which stands at the edge of history as its judge rather than being the truth about history. Then we could take some solace in the fact that although we regret mountaintop removal, there’s nothing we can do about it; so as a practical matter we’re going to keep doing it. This has been the general mood of the conservative response to radically extractive industry, and complacency is its chief mark.

The other temptation is to believe that if we put the proper legislation in place, if we provide the proper ideological underpinnings to our ecological policies, then the end of the violence we do to one another in the name of electric power (not to mention oil, paper, coffee and cucumbers) will be at hand. Christ has left his work up to us and we’d better get busy -- and the work had better be comprehensive. If the solutions aren’t wholesale and programmatic, then they cannot be real solutions. This has been the general mood of the "liberal" response to extractive industry, and immodesty is its chief mark.

Neither of these two options is satisfactory; neither of them is fully Christian in its understanding of the world’s violence or what it would mean to live in hope in the face of it. On the one hand, to regard violence as somehow "built in" to the structure of the world is to despair of Christ’s lordship over it. To say that the violence of coal extraction is inevitable is to despair of providing a description of the world as heading toward its redemption in Christ. It grants a kind of ultimate significance to something -- electricity -- that doesn’t merit it. We know this because our Lord has taught us that even food doesn’t have this kind of significance. So as a matter of greatest urgency it seems we should avoid the kind of violence to our brothers and sisters that electricity production so often entails. It also seems like one of the sillier sorts of idolatry to regard that violence as somehow sanctified by the fallen condition of the world.

On the other hand, to believe that we can force history to unfold in a way that will make this violence go away is foolish and risks a different sort of idolatry. If the previous view failed to understand the world as heading toward redemption, this one sees moving it toward being fixed as a human project. The problems of energy consumption will not be solved with a sweeping or programmatic policy. Why would we trust such an enterprise to deliver?

After all, legislation that restricts mountaintop coal extraction already exists. It was passed under the Carter administration in 1977. Coal companies must now appear before federal judges to get special permits for this process. Recently two such permits were issued for Blair Mountain itself. That ghastly fact might well provide us with another opportunity to speak and act about this problem. The point is that there’s no way of knowing or guaranteeing that our speaking and acting will be effective, and it’s a mistake to believe that they will be salvific. What Christians are awaiting is Christ’s return, not a technological or Caesar-led political triumph over such problems.

What’s the alternative? If the dominant conservative and liberal Christian approaches to these matters are not fully Christian in their understanding of the world’s violence, how should Christians respond to it? If we truly want to respond to violence in the way that Christ did (i.e., without resorting to still more violence), we will have to begin to think more in terms of witness and less in terms of solution. This means we won’t necessarily know in advance the details or size of our responses; we will know only their shape -- anticipation of the kingdom.

In the small 50-member Appalachian church where my wife is pastor, there was a mild controversy about cooling the sanctuary, a setting in which worshipers often swelter in the summer heat. The opposition to an expensive proposal to purchase and install air conditioning came largely from older members of the congregation. I assumed that these objections were fueled by the memories of lean times (the kind early coal miners experienced), which made them suspicious of any expenditures.

At a meeting one of these older members stepped forward. Max, a man in his late 70s whose family has been in this part of West Virginia for generations, mildly asked permission to share with the congregation some of his memories of its history. He pointed out the place in the sanctuary where the wood-fired furnace (once the sanctuary’s only source of heat) had stood. He explained how fans (the kind powered by hands and wrists) had once occupied every hymnal slot in the pews to stave off the heat in July. In his humble way he reminded us that the worship of God does not require electrically powered comfort. Only a deep confusion about what is necessary in our response to the Good News could make electricity seem so urgent. We don’t need large amounts of electric power in order to be faithful to God on Sunday mornings. If we don’t need it for that most important of activities, then how could it possibly be indispensable in any other context? Max reminds us of this question -- and the reminder liberates us from having to take such power seriously.

I don’t know if Max is conservative or liberal in his politics, although I suspect the former. I don’t know if he thinks of himself as an environmentalist, although I suspect not. What I do know is that his hope for Christ’s return and his commitment to loving God above all things relativizes the importance of electric power in his life and allows him to be a nonviolent witness against any idolatry of that power.

Max’s testimony invites us to join him in responding to the violence of electricity production and other violence in the way that God has -- with patience. It reminds us that the function of the church is precisely the function Max discharged in that local community -- to remember and display an alternative to idolatry. The only way to reject the violence of energy production without resorting to still more violence is to present the world with an alternative which witnesses to the redemptive possibility that we don’t need to live violently.

Are We There Yet? (Rom. 5:1-8)

When I take a long road trip the route I choose depends on whether I am driving my car or riding my motorcycle. If I have a tight time line, I drive my car. I prefer to travel on interstate highways if possible. My priority is to get to my destination quickly; I map out a route, set the cruise control, turn on the radio, fly through the countryside and stop only when absolutely necessary.

But if the weather is right and time is no factor, my priorities change. I grab my helmet and am off on my motorcycle. I avoid the interstate at all costs, mostly because I find Midwest interstates mind-numbingly boring to travel on a bike. I ride on back roads and state routes, take in the scenery and sometimes stop in a town even if I don’t need to refuel. These are two very different ways to get from point A to point B.

When I read Romans 5:1-8, I want to go from suffering to hope as quickly as possible. The words fly by me like scenery zooming past on the interstate: "We also boast in our sufferings, knowing-that-suffering-produces-endurance -and-endurance-produces-character-and-character-produces-hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us" (my hyphens). I try to slow down but I can’t. The end is what I like about the passage. I am impatient, focused on reaching that hopeful part. My brain asks, like a child’s voice: "Are we there yet?"

The mention of hope and love draws me. I feel called to share a message that gives people hope. Yet as powerful as it is to preach about God’s presence and enduring love, about looking forward in the midst of suffering, believers will hear this message differently depending on how quickly they are living through the succession of steps on their way to hope. Some believers could be just starting out on the suffering-to-hope journey. They may be experiencing suffering as just that: suffering. For them suffering is producing anger, sadness and pain well ahead of any promised endurance their experience might bring. Paul’s route for this trip may be clearly mapped out, but for some it’s not a trip on a straight interstate highway at 65 miles an hour. Instead it feels more like a dizzying drive on a road with steep climbs, narrow bridge crossings and warning signs. On this winding road, the journey takes on a new dimension. Those words -- suffering, endurance, character, hope -- are like signs for small towns you ride through on a motorcycle. They are not the backdrop for the trip, but part of the experience. Paul seems to have traveled this road. He knows the curves and uphill climbs, and he knows the little towns along the road. He has lived in each of them -- in some for short periods of time, in others longer than he had anticipated.

We meet people everyday who live in these towns. They move from one town to the next, and perhaps back again, depending on what life throws their way. If I am to preach a message of hope that will be heard and believed, I must make it clear that I have taken the back roads and come to know the townsfolk in Suffering on a first-name basis, have stayed in Endurance, and have relatives who live in Character and Hope. Somehow all these places have been part of my life’s journey. If I try to speak about these little towns while keeping a sate distance, those people not currently living in Hope may wonder if I really understand what it takes to traverse their winding roads.

A couple of years after I accepted my best position as minister, serving as pastor of a church in St. Anne, Illinois, my parents came from Mexico for a visit, During their stay my father, who had recently turned 80, suffered a minor stroke that paralyzed the left side of his body. We took him to a local hospital, where he stayed for a week. My mother refused to leave his bedside, and the intensive care unit made arrangements so she could stay with him. The week is a blur in my mind, but I know that every day I went to the hospital to support Mom and Dad. He was able to regain a good deal of his prestroke mobility by the time he was released from the hospital but was still too weak to travel back home. That Sunday, as I led the congregation in the first hymn, I looked up and saw my family making a late entrance. Dad walked slowly down the sanctuary’s center aisle, assisted by my wife on one side and my mom on the other.

Seeing Dad looking so frail brought up all the emotions that had been bottled up through the week, and my tears flowed so freely that I could not continue singing. My ministry at that church, which lasted ten years, hit a pivotal moment that Sunday. When the members of the congregation saw me in pain, they ministered to me -- not from a distance, but as fellow travelers on the same patch of winding road. They comforted me, and through their actions they taught me how to give direction to a lost traveler looking for a town called Hope.

As Good as Dead (Rom. 4:13-25; Matt. 9:9-13, 18-26)

Aron Ralston knew he would die before the next morning’s sunrise. Five days earlier he’d been walking a trail in a narrow desert canyon in Utah and had climbed down from a large chock-stone along his route. A chock-stone is a huge boulder that’s wedged between other stones or canyon walls. This one may have been there for hundreds of years, but when Ralston came down, he somehow loosened the boulder, and it fell on him. When it stopped, the stone was wedged against both canyon walls, and his right wrist was between one of those walls and the boulder.

For five days, this experienced climber tried a thousand plans and a thousand variations on a plan to get himself free using the climbing equipment he had brought along. Ralston even considered amputating his arm, but his only available knife was not sharp enough. He had water and food for only a daylong hike, so he tried to ration it. As his struggle continued and the hours passed, Ralston reached into his backpack to get

his video camera, and for several days he recorded his thoughts, speaking into the camera and addressing himself to all his loved ones in a farewell. Ralston fig-ured that someone would eventually come across his body and deliver the tape to his family. As the fifth evening of his ordeal approached, he felt certain he would die that night, probably of hypothermia. With his knife he etched a date on the canyon wall to complete an epitaph he had been writing over the past few days:

RIP

OCT 75

ARON

APR03

To his surprise, however, he survived the night, and in the morning a new idea came to him -- a divine revelation, he felt. He understood what he had to do to cut off his arm. He knew his knife could never cut through his bones, but realized that if he twisted his body enough, the boulder and the canyon wall would function as a vise grip until his forearm bones snapped. After that, he could cut the remaining muscle and nerves. He succeeded. He was able to amputate his arm, went looking for help and encountered the search party that was looking for him,

When a National Public Radio interviewer asked Ralston about his decision, he replied:

The moment when I figured out how I could get free, it was the best idea and the most beautiful experience I will ever have in my life. . . . It was all euphoria and not a bit of horror, It was having my life back after being dead.

The scriptures are rich with stories of new or renewed life, In the passages for this Sunday, we encounter several people who were "as good as dead" -- one was dead -- but with whom God was not yet finished. There is old Abraham, the patriarch whose promised line of descendants had not materialized. There is the woman with the hemorrhage, whose life with an illness was becoming more illness than life. Finally, there is the synagogue leader’s daughter, who had died and was being mourned by her family. But all three -- Abraham, the unnamed woman and the synagogue leader -- possessed a living faith and sensed that God would perform a sign of new life for them. God heard their prayers and gifted them with life, so that faithful Abraham and Sarah received their firstborn, the daring woman reached out to touch Jesus’ robe, and the hopeful synagogue leader brought Jesus to his daughter so Jesus could give her life again. The outward foolishness of the pleas by these faithful men and women had brought ridiculing laughter from the crowd, but when new life sprang up where death or loss had once claimed victory, the reaction turned to awe.

There are times when we come to believe that we are as good as dead. There may even be people around us laughing at our wishful thinking that new life could still spring up. The moment of grace comes when the Spirit stirs within us, revealing new options. The Spirit gives us the peace to withstand the pain, loss and ridicule we will encounter on the way to discovering new life after being as good as dead.

When I was a young child growing up in Mexico, my family experienced a crushing financial blow. My parents had sold our house because they were building a new house in a middle-class neighborhood in Monterrey, but the architect and contractor ran off with my parents’ life savings. My family could not stay in our old house because the new owners needed to move in, and our new house was unfinished and at risk of being foreclosed on by the bank. Displaying a resilient and daring faith, my parents decided to move our family into the new house even though it did not have doors, windows or flooring. Our neighbors must have thought we were squatters commandeering an abandoned house. After years in court, although they were not able to recover their money, my parents were allowed to keep the unfinished house. It was not the victory they’d prayed for, but it was the kind of miracle for which they’d hoped.

The stories of the synagogue leader, the healed woman and the ancient patriarch teach us about daring to hold God accountable for promises God has made to care for God’s people. The answer to their prayers did not turn back the clock to happier days, but moved these people forward into healing. Their stories of new life touch us deeply and challenge us to pray for discernment, so we may know that the feeling of being "as good as dead" is not the end of the story.

In Need of a Pope?

Do Protestants need the papacy? Given the recent fascination with the pontificate of John Paul II and with the election of Benedict XVI, it would seem that the papacy is on the Protestant horizon in a way that would have been unthinkable even a generation ago. This may be the result of savvy marketing, the omnipresence of CNN, the celebrity status of John Paul II or a penchant for the exotic. But I think something more is going on. It is the papacy itself that fascinates us.

Protestants find ourselves in the odd situation of seeing a need for the papacy. Our fate seems linked with it. Three reasons in particular emerge for why Protestants need the papacy.

The first reason is a negative one:

Protestants need the papacy because we must have something to protest against. Protestantism is a 500-year-old tradition of protest and dissent against tradition.

What began as an effort to reform the institutional Catholic Church has become its own institution in need of reform. But how does one dissent against a tradition of dissent? Every act of dissent merely reproduces the tradition; there seems no way out of these conservative tentacles, which become increasingly more reactionary even under liberal guise.

The final logic of this version of Protestantism can only be that each individual makes up his or her own religion, which will then be defined over and against every other individual’s religion. In other words, what holds this tradition together is that it is against something. This kind of Protestantism needs an object against which it dissents for its own identity. If there were no papacy, no tradition, no doctrine, no common moral teaching against which to protest, it would lose its identity. As we learn from Nietzsche and Freud, such a reactionary movement must secretly desire the very thing it hates for the sake of its identity.

There are also two positive reasons Protestants need the papacy; for the sake of the unity of the church, and for the sake of truth grounded in love.

The papacy offers an impressive visible manifestation of the church’s unity. Christians must seek the unity of Christ’s body in a visible way through the church. Both scripture and tradition so clearly bear witness to this claim that I need not argue for it here. When it comes to visible unity, it is time for us Protestants to admit that we have failed. We are disunified beyond repair and cannot solve our divisions through our traditionally Protestant resources. Perhaps it is time to look to the papacy for the necessary visible manifestation of Christian unity; perhaps it alone provides the necessary unity of the church through a subjective and personal reality that mirrors that of Jesus Christ himself.

Christ left us no written sources, no legal contracts or juridical means of unity. Instead he mediates God’s presence to us in and through human flesh. Perhaps the papacy bears witness to this reality better than other instruments of unity (to trade on an Anglican term).

I would not deny that Protestants already share to an extent in the Catholic unity. In fact, this is the official teaching of the Catholic Church itself. Its catechism states that "one cannot charge with the sin of separation those who at present are born into these communities [that resulted from separation] and in them are brought up in the faith of Christ, and the Catholic Church accepts them with respect and affection as brothers." Those of us who came to love God through these separated communions are correct to declare our faith in the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church." Holy scripture, the ancient confessions, baptism, liturgy and the common life of faith, hope and love all function in part as instruments of unity.

But none of these instruments of unity have worked to avoid practices of ever-repeating and deepening division and schism. Could this be because these means are primarily objective and juridical? Because they assume no "fleshly" mediation? Perhaps we have tried to find unity through means that do not express as well as they could the reality of Christ’s incarnation.

Objective and juridical means lack the human reality of the papal unity. They cannot express affection. They do not pronounce blessing and benediction. They cannot ask for forgiveness for past errors or make claims for truth. They do not grow frail, show the wear of time, and die. All this the pope can do. He can be loved in a way that these other instruments of unity cannot. This is what struck me in the events that transpired in St. Peter’s Square over the past few weeks.

Of course, the other instruments of unity do attract our love and devotion. But they are more easily used than loved. What we have seen in the funeral of John Paul II and the election of Benedict XVI is the possibility of loving the faith as a human gift that is received, and in that very reception acknowledging its contingency and fragility.

Hugo Rahner once wrote, "All the churches who wish to withdraw from the unity of the church dogmatically first of all seek refuge within the state but soon are absorbed by the state and fall with it." This is why, he suggested, "the guiding role of the papacy is needed."

Can those of us who are Protestants deny this accusation? Could we ever see in our own churches the transnational, multicultural and multiclass expression of love and joy we witnessed in St. Peter’s Square? If not, then how can we refuse to acknowledge the beauty of the papacy?

The final reason Protestants need the papacy is to avoid the subordination of truth to power that so characterizes the modern era and its totalitarian politics. We have lived through an era in which it was assumed that every truth claim was finally nothing but a disguised appeal for power. The great hermeneuts of suspicion taught us to look upon truth with this posture, and it is difficult to free ourselves from it -- to abandon ourselves to the possibility that truth might be more basic to our lives than the will to power. We fear we will give up something significant if we give up this posture. We fear that the stance of assuming truth or goodness is more basic than power will inevitably lead not to unity but to an improper totalizing or fascism, and this some Protestants seem to fear more than the loss of truth itself.

John Paul II taught us to risk truth and not be content with the modern assumption that peace can only be had when we confess power as the most basic reality of our lives. He was not alone in bearing witness before the world to "the splendor of truth." This has been a common witness of the papacy in the modern era, and contrary to all expectations of those who thought that the suspicious posture was necessary for the sake of peace, the posture of suspicion produced more violence than the assumption of a basic and foundational truth and goodness.

This is the beautiful scandal of the papacy: it is an institution that proclaims that truth is more basic than power even when those of us weaned on a (Protestant) hermeneutics of suspicion can only see the papacy as a contradiction.

To see the beauty of truth requires a Protestant rethinking of the papacy. This does not mean denying that truth and power are always linked, but it does mean rejecting the notion that the former is always vitiated by the latter. Even where we still disagree with what the Catholic Church pronounces, we will have to address the truth of what is pronounced and not simply dismiss it as a sinister play for power.

Don’t get me wrong. I have no romantic illusions about the papacy. I understand its historical legacy and the legitimate reasons why Protestants separated from the Catholic Church. But Catholics themselves acknowledge this history as well. "Serious dissentions appeared," the Catholic catechism tells us, "and large communities became separated from full communion with the Catholic Church -- for which, often enough, men of both sides were to blame." The Catholic Church has acknowledged contributing to the ruptures that divide us, ruptures that are always sin. We Protestants must now reciprocate and name our sin in dividing Christ’s body. Can we do this without rethinking its unity in the primacy of the bishop of Rome? I do not think so.

At one point in history, to be a Protestant was explicitly or tacitly to will an end to the papacy. I think many Protestants can now confess that was a mistaken view. Both the church and the world would sorely lack a necessary witness if there were no papacy. If being a Protestant means willing the end to the papacy then I find myself no longer capable of willing such an act.

This stance does not require abandoning what is good in Protestant traditions. I for one cannot leave my separated Wesleyan communion behind. The hymns, doctrine, discipline and liturgy of that tradition gave me faith and taught me to love God. But neither can I will an end to the unity the papacy clearly produces throughout the world.

So what is to be done? Only two possibilities seem to present themselves. Either we try to find a place for our separated communities from within the Catholic Church or we find a place for Catholic unity from within our separated communities. Neither can be accomplished without willing the visible unity the papacy embodies.

Doing Justice to Justification

Book Review:

Christ Present in Faith: Luther’s View of Justification. By Tuomo Mannermaa. Fortress, 158 pp., paperback.

One with God: Salvation as Deification and Justification. By Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen. Liturgical Press, 152 pp., $14.95 paperback.

The Role of Justification in Contemporary Theology. By Mark C. Mattes. Eerdmans, 216 pp., paperback.

Justification: What’s at Stake in the Current Debates? Edited by Mark Husbands and Daniel J. Treier InterVarsity Press, 280 pp., paperback.

Two millennia ago the risen Jesus Christ invaded the world of a Jewish rabbi named Paul, destroyed the cosmic order as he knew it, incorporated him into a "new creation" and conscripted him for a mission that extended throughout the Roman Empire and to the ends of the earth. For Paul the crucifixion, resurrection and exaltation of Jesus Christ was God’s decisive apocalyptic act of delivering the cosmos and humanity from enslaving powers. It brought into being a whole new order of things, the shape of which is given in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus himself, and the power of which is given in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

Paul’s proclamation of God’s apocalypse in Christ and the Spirit created communities of faithful comrades ("brothers and sisters") called to a life of harmonious solidarity. The ancient divisions and enmities between Jew and gentile (the "righteous" and the "unrighteous"), powerful and weak, slave and free, male and female, were destroyed by God’s act of justice in Jesus. God’s right-making power was alive and on the move among the nations. To these God-created communities Paul wrote letters in which he reiterated the good news of God’s justice and power in Christ, and instructed the members in a way of life commensurate with that news.

At times in those letters Paul spoke of the cosmic-apocalyptic, world-destroying and world-creating act of God in Christ as dikaiosis, meaning "rectification" or "justification." This word summed up the way in which God’s power was at work setting right and transforming all created relationships. Most specifically, it summed up how God through Christ was reaching out, astonishingly, even to the gentiles, conquering the idols and powers which enslaved them and establishing covenant with them, apart from the works of Torah, as he once did with Abraham and Sarah long ago.

The foregoing rendition of Paul’s gospel of justification might sound odd to Protestants for whom justification by faith is the doctrine about how God sets individual sinners right with God as they put their faith in Jesus. Their sins are atoned through the death of Christ, who took those sins upon himself, and therefore God "reckons" or "imputes" righteousness to sinners as a kind of forensic or legal judgment. Thus they stand in faith before the righteous God not weighed down with their sins, which would merit God’s wrath, but clothed in the righteousness of Christ, and therein they are recipients of God’s favor.

This understanding of justification has held sway in Protestant theology since the time of Luther. In many respects it continues to be the hallmark and touchstone of Protestant faith. It also remains a core assumption of each of the books reviewed here, even if some of the authors would like to correct, complement or complete it with other understandings.

Tuomo Mannermaa and Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen represent the Finnish school of Luther interpretation, a movement which began in ecumenical conversations between Lutherans and Russian Orthodox (the two main denominations in Finland). Mannermaa, emeritus professor at the University of Helsinki, is the key figure in this movement, and Christ Present in Faith (which appeared in German in 1989) lays out its fundamental argument.

Mannermaa is convinced that Luther’s theology of justification is not as exclusively forensic, juridical, imputational and transactional as it has traditionally been understood. According to Mannermaa, Luther believed that Christ is really and personally ("ontically") present in the believer in faith, and that the believer in turn really (ontically) participates by faith in the person and work of Jesus Christ. And that, according to Mannermaa, is precisely the meaning of justification for Luther: "The Christ who dwells in faith in Christians is the Christian righteousness that God imputes to them" (emphasis in the original).

Mannermaa’s further point is that this mutual indwelling and participation of Christ and the believer, which is the very meaning of justification for Luther, is strikingly close to the Orthodox understanding of theosis or divinization, the doctrine that the Christian is saved by being incorporated into Christ’s humanity, joined to his divinity and made a sharer in God’s own triune life. The text of 2 Peter 1:4 ("and [you] may become participants of the divine nature") is at the heart of the Orthodox doctrine of theosis. Mannermaa shows that Luther made use of that text at some critical junctures. On the basis of extensive quotations from Luther, Mannermaa draws the Reformer’s doctrine of justification and the Orthodox doctrine of theosis into the closest possible harmony, thoroughly absorbing the forensic aspect of justification into a theology of ontic participation.

Mannermaa’s revolutionary argument is increasingly (though by no means universally) accepted among North American Lutheran theologians, most notably by Robert Jenson in his Systematic Theology (particularly volume 2). The publication in English of Christ Present in Faith is sure to extend that acceptance, as well as to stimulate vigorous argument.

The great service of the slim volume by Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, professor of systematic theology at Fuller Theological Seminary, is to introduce the work of the Finnish school and to propose that "salvation as deification and justification" is a crucial contribution to ecumenical discussions not only between Lutherans and Orthodox but also between Eastern and Western theologies. In fact, Kärkkäinen suggests that deification is also an important theme in the Anabaptist, Methodist and evangelical traditions. Whether or not that argument is persuasive, Kärkkäinen fills in some valuable pieces of the justification-as-deification puzzle by providing a very helpful chapter on the doctrine of deification in the Eastern Orthodox tradition.

The Finnish School is not without its critics. For Mark C. Mattes, professor of philosophy and religion at Grand View College in Des Moines, Luther’s doctrine of justification is the key critical principle for all theological activity: "The doctrine of justification is the critical point that shapes other doctrines and practices." Mattes puts the doctrine of justification to use in just this way, employing it in a critique of the theologies of Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Robert Jenson and Oswald Bayer. Jüngel, Moltmann and Pannenberg in particular are judged (rightly, to my mind) to have accommodated themselves too deeply to post-Kantian philosophy, Hegelianism especially, and to have been too ready to meet secular modernity on its own terms through various versions of what Mattes characterizes as "natural theology." Mattes detects these weaknesses most evidently in their respective doctrines of justification, read against his own version of Luther’s doctrine. (I was left wondering, however, whether the same criticisms might be made by employing another critical principle.)

Jenson fares much better, yet Mattes is also critical of (among other things) Jenson’s recent turn toward Mannermaa. The Finnish emphasis on mutual indwelling and participation "jeopardizes the centrality and objectivity of the external word’ (verbum externum), God’s means to comfort anxious consciences threatened by the accusatory function of the law." For Mattes, the doctrine of union with God must be subordinate to the doctrine of justification.

The hero of Mattes’s story is Bayer, a professor at Tübingen University whose works are largely unknown in North America because few have been translated (although Living by Faith: Justification and Sanctification recently appeared in translation in the same Eerdmans series as Mattes’s book). In Bayer’s theology of justification, with its proper dialectic of law and gospel, Mattes detects the possibility of a truly critical, nonaccommodationist engagement of culture, a full affirmation of creation as God’s address, and an appropriate account of the relationship between justification understood in forensic terms and justification understood as human transformation.

One could get the impression that recent concern over the doctrine of justification is pretty much a Lutheran thing. The volume edited by Mark Husbands and Donald Treier shows otherwise, collecting essays from Baptist, Roman Catholic, Reformed, Wesleyan and evangelical scholars who gathered at Wheaton College for a conference on the theme in 2003. The only essay by a Lutheran, Robert KoIb’s, gives a valuable survey of recent Lutheran theology on justification, although it gives only pass-ing mention to the Finnish school. A number of other essays treat the doctrine of justification in historic traditions (e.g., Wesleyan) or at key historic moments in its history (e.g., the Regensburg Colloquy, at which Protestant and Catholic theologians produced a statement of agreement on justification -- in 1541!). Some of the essays examine the doctrine in the work of various recent theologians: Philip Ziegler has a fine essay on Paul Lehmann, and Paul Molnar examines the doctrine in Barth, Rahner and the 1999 joint Lutheran and Catholic declaration on justification.

The best and boldest essay is by Bruce L. McCormack who breaks new ground in an effort to think through the relation of God’s action and human action in justification by proposing a "covenant ontology," an attempt to say what is "essentially" human. "What we are essentially is a divine act which establishes a covenantal relation -- a relation which perdures and makes us to be what we are even when, in our perversity, we choose to live on the basis of a lie rather than the truth. . . . The faith and obedience by means of which my humanity conforms to the humanity of Jesus Christ is the effect of the divine declaration given in the justification of the ungodly.. . At its heart, forensicism is deeply ontological."

While McCormack does not discuss the Finnish school, he is clearly proposing his own view as an alternative to it -- and his is on more solid Pauline ground.

One might also get the impression that the doctrine of justification begins with Luther, and that the crucial question is how to interpret Luther rather than how to interpret Paul. That certainly seems to be the case for Mannermaa and Mattes. The reader must search for references to Paul, and when they appear they turn out to be little more than proof-texts. Kärkkäinen has a rather sketchy chapter on recent Paul scholarship which ends up having little if any bearing on his subsequent discussion. An extended exegesis of Paul is virtually absent from all four of these books, with the exception of two essays in the collection by Husbands and Treier.

Unfortunately, those two essays, by evangelical scholars Robert Gundry and D. A. Carson, are so thoroughly embedded in the Protestant evangelical understanding of justification as a matter of individual salvation that the reader gets little sense that a revolution has been under way in Pauline studies for 30 years or more. That individualist focus is largely sustained in all the books under review.

According to the "new perspective" in Pauline scholarship -- represented in the works of E. P. Sanders, James D.G. Dunn, Terence Donaldson and N. T. Wright -- Paul uses the language of justification predominantly in considering how gentiles are incorporated into the Abrahamic people of God. Whereas Jews of Paul’s time would have regarded the Jewish people as the righteous (or the circumcised) and the gentiles as the unrighteous (or the uncircumcised), Paul proclaims that God has "righteoused" (Sanders’s rendition of dikaioo) the gentiles by including them in God’s covenant with Abraham through the death and resurrection of Christ apart from works of Torah. Righteousness and justification in this understanding are not so much moral terms as covenantal terms, having to do with the identity and boundaries of the people of God.

When in Romans 4 Paul speaks of God "justifying" the "ungodly" Abraham when he believed God, Paul does not mean that Abraham was morally "wicked" (as, for example, Carson has it), but that Abraham was still effectively a gentile, uncircumcised, and therefore unrighteous from a Jewish perspective. God counted Abraham’s believing, rather than his circumcision, as covenant-righteousness, and so Abraham is also the father of "righteoused" gentiles who turn from their idols and believe God but are not circumcised.

Though Carson dismisses the new perspective with an anecdote and a couple of footnotes, and the rest of the authors reviewed here ignore it altogether (except Kärkkäinen in a brief chapter), key elements of the new perspective are now widely accepted among Paul scholars, not least among many Lutheran New Testament scholars. While I believe there are some significant limitations to the new perspective, there is no turning back to a pre-Sanders view of Paul.

The outline of Paul’s gospel which I rendered in the opening is partially informed by the new perspective, but is more deeply indebted to the "apocalyptic" interpretation of Paul recently advanced by J. Louis Martyn and others, notably Martinus de Boer and Beverly Roberts Gaventa. Martyn’s commentary on Galatians and essays on Paul set a new standard for the theological interpretation of Paul because of their insistence that Paul’s mission and letters are radically about God and God’s action in Jesus Christ (a point that is sometimes muted by the more sociologically oriented new perspective). Through Jesus Christ, in his faithful life and death on the cross (following Richard Hays and others, I read pistis Iesou Christou as "the faith of Jesus Christ" rather than "faith in Jesus Christ"), and God’s vindication of his faithfulness in the resurrection, God invades the creation (and not just the lives of individual sinners) which has fallen powerfully under the control of the anti-God powers of sin and death and the "principalities and powers" and the "rulers of this age."

God not only invades the territory occupied by these powers (which is in fact God’s own territory -- creation and the nations) but also conquers the powers through the obedience of Christ on the cross. In the cross, and in the people of God, who live by the cross, God inaugurates a new creation, a new space and time in which rectified, restored and renewed human action is called forth. This activity is always cultural, corporate and political in nature. Such is the scope of God’s rectifying justice in Jesus Christ. This understanding of justification challenges and alters the traditional interpretation in fundamental ways. More important, it shines critical gospel light into the regions of culture, politics and the social order.

There are strong hints in this direction in Oswald Bayer, who, according to Mattes’s presentation, explores the social and creational scope of the doctrine. A more promising effort is the work of Paul Lehmann, as exhibited in Ziegler’s essay in the volume by Husbands and Treier. Ziegler cites Lehmann as saying that "the reality of justification transfigures the nature of the boundary between the Christian community and the world." Lehmann did not have the benefit of the recent scholarship on Paul, but his claim could easily be developed from the way Paul addresses the boundary between the Jewish people of God and the gentile peoples with the doctrine of justification. Ziegler writes: "And so, Lehmann once observed, for evangelical Christians -- that is, for Christians who by grace have received the good report that the world-destroying and world-constituting event of justification constitutes the all-encompassing and determinative context of life -- all human struggles, including the struggle for a better human justice, ‘derive their significance from the struggle of God."’

Lehmann -- not surprisingly, a colleague and close friend of Martyn at Union Theological Seminary in New York -- saw clearly that the doctrine of justification has direct and radical social and political consequences. This dimension of the doctrine of justification, almost wholly neglected in the books reviewed here, needs to move to the center of the discussion of the doctrine "by which the church stands or falls."

Lets Talk About Sex

Like any Catholic college, mine boasts an ethic of sexual abstinence for students, does not allow any form of birth control to be distributed on campus, and has same-sex residence halls that post visiting hours for members of the opposite sex. Yet most students will tell you, if asked in the right setting, that there is a gap between the ideal and the reality when it comes to sex.

The overwhelming pressure toward promiscuity and the prevalence of "hook-up" sex became clear during a course I taught this past spring called "Dating and Friendship." After reading through Joshua Harris’s I Kissed Dating Goodbye and Lauren Winner’s Real Sex, students found the courage to look the hook-up ethos in the face. Sex became a topic of conversation within the classroom and outside it. Students were saying: We’re not happy with the sexual ethic here. We want to integrate spirituality into our dating lives. We live in a community that professes one thing and practices another -- and we need to talk about this.

The students also asked: How can we change things? Their answer was to publish a one-issue, onetime newspaper called Dateline SMC, devoted to addressing the realities of "sex, love, intimacy, hooking up, dating, and other relationships found on campus" through a "deep and mature conversation "with the Christian faith in mind and an eye toward reestablishing abstinence as a value and practice among students.

Like Winner, my students began with autobiography and then crept as best as they could toward theology. They told of their "walks of shame" back to the dorm, and of losing their virginity and wishing they could turn back the clock. One student bemoaned that "the bottom line is: sex sells and we buy it." Another confessed that she’d "been thinking a lot about intimacy lately, and wondering if [she was] any good at it."

One article, titled "Drink, If You’ve Done It in the Road," discussed a popular drinking game on campus that celebrates public sex. As a freshman the author had watched her friends confess, between gulps of beer, to having sex on pool tables and in people’s yards. "A virgin at the time," she wrote, she left the party "humiliated."

Another story, headlined "Weekend Cinderellas," described the weekend hook-ups that come with a Monday expiration date. She told of young women who wake up "to find that [their] loose approximation of Prince Charming was drooling all over the pillow," and how they regretted the night before, realizing that after the "spell is broken, and everything is as it was before," each goes his or her separate way as if nothing happened. She urged students to stop settling for weekend hook-ups.

Every article expressed confusion over how to reconcile sexuality and dating practices with faith, yet also the desire to integrate the two. They called on our community to take an honest look at how it deals with (or avoids) talking about sex.

As the campus reacted to the newspaper, in the faculty lounge, in classrooms, in the hallways and in the residence halls, I realized how powerful student voices can be. While some individuals responded with shock at the alleged level of promiscuity in our community, most were grateful for the honest conversation. Faculty members from various departments devoted class time to discussing Dateline SMC. First-year students talked about how liberating it was to hear juniors and seniors say that it was "OK to say no" to sex and that virginity is a virtue.

Winner argues that sexual formation is a community responsibility, not a private matter. It is everyone’s job to draw sex from the darkness of student dorm rooms into the public spaces of classrooms and church communities so young people aren’t left alone as they attempt to understand Christian teachings in a culture adept at "selling" sex.

God on the Loose (Ps. 29; Mt. 3:1-17)

Inevitably, in the course of a pastoral career, one encounters that person -- the spouse of an active member, or an avid golfer -- who claims not to need to attend weekly services because "I can worship God in nature." Possible comebacks range from mild to sarcastic, but they rarely make any impression. A better question is whether the assertion is correct. Can the voice of the Lord be heard outside protective church walls, in the wilds of creation?

Psalm 29 answers with an emphatic yes. With one catch: you might not like what you hear.

The voice of the Lord is heard seven times in Psalm 29: it is over d the waters, powerful and full of majesty; it breaks the cedars; flashes forth flames of fire; shakes the wilder-ness; makes the hinds to calve (or shakes the oaks – the Hebrew is ambiguous) and strips the forests bare. The glory of God thunders. The Lord makes Lebanon to skip like a calf and Sirion (Mt. Hermon) like a young wild ox, or, as the King James Version more charmingly puts it, "like a young unicorn." Is this really the God you want to encounter on the Appalachian Trail?

The cedars stand as warning enough on their own. The famous cedars of Lebanon were Solomon’s choice for building the first temple, and were selected specially by King Hiram of Tyre. They can grow over 100 feet tall, their circumference exceeding 50 feet, with wood that is perfumed, resinous evergreen and both rot- and knot-free. Such was their grip on the Israelite imagination that these trees are mentioned everywhere, from levitical codes of purification to prophetic analogies in Isaiah and Ezekiel. The latter compare the once-mighty, soon-to-fall Assyria with a cedar so splendid that "all the trees of Eden envied it."

But like sinful humans, these fabulous cedars are not permitted to remain in their pride. They are paired with lowly hyssop, a small and straggling foil to the cedars’ magnitude. In the Torah, cedar and hyssop work together to cleanse from leprosy. Solomon speaks of cedar and hyssop in one breath. Midrashic commentator Rabbi Isaac bar Tanlai chastises a former great: "You were proud like the cedar … but the Holy One humbled you like the hyssop that is crushed by everyone." In the end, it is hyssop that quenches the thirst of the dying Messiah. Lowliness serves the lowly, but when might matches might, the voice of the Lord triumphs, breaking the cedars.

And all this is to say nothing of the Lord over the waters. This God has proved himself before in the aqueous arena. There God’s Spirit was hovering and brooding, preparing to speak the first word that would bring something out of nothing. When that something turned to evil, and the one remaining righteous man built a little boat out of gopher wood, the waters came again to speak the Lord’s word of judgment against his people. Much later, the waters split in half to pave an escape route for enslaved Israelites, and folded shut to swallow up the pursuing Egyptians. And once a storm was conjured just to grip the attention of runaway Jonah out at sea, terrifying untold numbers of sailors in its wake.

The God who commands the waters commands everything else. So this psalm isn’t just an utterance of awe at the power wielded in and over nature. It’s also a polemic directed against confused pagans (and probably not a few confused Israelites) who mistakenly gave credit to idols. It’s no accident that Psalm 29 sounds so much like its Canaanite predecessors, observes scholar Peter C. Craigie. If anything, it’s deliberate, co-opting "the general storm image of battle . . . into a tauntlike psalm; the praise of the Lord, by virtue of being expressed in language and imagery associated with the Canaanite weather-god, Baal,

taunts the weak deity of the defeated foes, namely the Canaanites." Anything the heathen thought belonged to Baal really belongs to the Lord, and there’s no better way to show it than by stealing the adjectives of one "god" and applying them to the other.

But still: even if this God is the creator and righteous judge, not the pseudo-divinity and pretender Baal, would you really want to meet him without a sturdy raincoat, a pair of galoshes and a friend with an SUV who could pick you up and bail you out? It is an act of extraordinary faith on the psalmist’s part to conclude with the encouraging words, "May the Lord give strength to his people! May the Lord bless his people with peace!" For whatever the voice of the Lord is saying under the circumstances detailed in the psalm, no one can hear it and live. If this is the voice that produced the succession of devastating hurricanes in the Gulf last fall, the only sensible solution is not to worship, but to evacuate. You can’t ride this storm. You must, as Luther said, "flee from God to God," from the God who drives you out to the same God who welcomes you home.

This God, who is over many waters and sits enthroned over the flood, has himself been swept overboard, immersed and engulfed in the river Jordan. Baptism with water is not enough, for God also flashes forth flames of fire: he baptizes with fire and the Holy Spirit. Water and fire on their own are words of God that are encoded and indecipherable. To worship God in unmediated nature is to risk ruination. But to drown in the waters of baptism in which the Lord himself was drowned, to receive the pentecostal fire of the Spirit which the Lord himself sent -- in this way we creatures of nature can worship our God in nature, and live.