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Bonhoeffer and the Path of Resistance

Book Review:

Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence.

By Stanley Hauerwas. Brazos Press, 252 pp.

Stanley Hauerwas and I first met at a conference at Bethel College in Kansas in the early 1980s. I had spent a semester at Bethel some years before when I gave the Menno Simons lectures there (The Church Struggle in South Africa), and I remain indebted to that vibrant Mennonite community for introducing me to the writings of John Howard Yoder, with whom I later became well acquainted. Like Hauerwas, I was deeply influenced by Yoder’s Politics of Jesus, one of the seminal theological texts of the 20th century. But unlike Hauerwas, who reads Dietrich Bonhoeffer through the eyes of Yoder and in the context of a North American Christendom imperium, I read Yoder under the influence of Bonhoeffer and in the context of the South African church struggle.

During that first stay at Bethel I gave a series of talks on Bonhoeffer and Anabaptism, having written my dissertation on the ecclesiologies of Barth and Bonhoeffer some years before. I had done something similar when, in 1963, as a student in Chicago I had visited Reba Place Fellowship, an intentional community in suburban Evanston, and discovered among its members a great interest in Bonhoeffer’s Discipleship, but an equally passionate aversion to his involvement in the conspiracy against Hitler. Such principled pacifism was something new to me. But by the time I gave my talks at Bethel, I virtually espoused that position. What held me back from full commitment was Bonhoeffer’s "ethic of free responsibility," that is, his "boundary ethics," what Barth called the Grenzfall.

In later years I had several opportunities, in South Africa and elsewhere, to discuss Bonhoeffer with Yoder. His monograph Karl Barth and the Problem of War had awakened me to the dangers of the Grenzfall "as a tool of ethical thought." His critique of Reinhold Niebuhr, not unlike that of Bonhoeffer’s, had also alerted me to the dangers of "political realism." Yet, as Yoder discovered on his visits to South Africa in the late 1970s, his principled pacifism was hotly contested. The main liberation movement, the ANC, long committed to nonviolent resistance under the influence of Gandhi and its Christian roots, had by 1963 decided, after agonizing debate, to engage in an armed struggle. My reading of Bonhoeffer’s essay "The Structure of Responsible Life" resonated with the moral arguments put forward by the ANC. Much later I wrote an essay comparing Nelson Mandela’s "Speech from the Dock" and Bonhoeffer’s essay, pointing out that while the two situations were different, the moral arguments were much the same, and equally compelling.

Back to Hauerwas. Performing the Faith is composed of three sections, only the first of which is directly on Bonhoeffer. Indeed, there is no reference to Bonhoeffer beyond page 67, as Hauerwas himself acknowledges. Chapter one provides a good introduction to Bonhoeffer’s life and the development of his theology, and chapter two a helpful and provocative introduction to his political ethics. Well written, these chapters offer a fresh and challenging perspective on Bonhoeffer.

The rest of the book is made up of essays and papers on various topics related to the practice of nonviolence and truth in the political arena, each written with the sharp insight and passion characteristic of Hauerwas’s writings. There are chapters engaging Thomas Aquinas, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Victor Preller, Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Milbank; one on penal justice; two, including a sermon, on September 11, 2001; and a postscript on Jeff Stout’s Democracy and Tradition. There is also an excellent account of "suffering beauty" that Hauerwas evocatively deals with in relation to "the liturgical formation of Christ’s body." This chapter could well be expanded into a• book dealing with some of Bonhoeffer’s thoughts on "aesthetic existence." But let me concentrate on Hauerwas’s account of Bonhoeffer’s approach to politics and especially the question of nonviolence.

Unlike some who notoriously made critical misuse of Bonhoeffer at a time when we were all being "honest to God," Hauerwas has revisited much of the literature pertinent to the issues. But he makes no claim to be a Bonhoeffer scholar, and he expresses the hope that "those who are tell me where I may or may not have gotten Bonhoeffer wrong." At the same time he suggests that his "account of Bonhoeffer offers a different perspective on his work." Indeed, he writes; "I hope my account of Bonhoeffer makes life difficult for my critics who hold Bonhoeffer in high regard but dismiss me as a ‘sectarian.’ If I am right about Bonhoeffer, then they must equally dismiss Bonhoeffer." But, of course, it is not quite so straightforward and simple as that. We are all "sectarians" in some sense or other, and every interpretation of Bonhoeffer is precisely that.

Hauerwas is right; the world must be allowed to remain the world, to be secular; the church must seek to be the church, always in the world while struggling not to be of it, and always a visible community committed to the truth. Hauerwas’s reading of Bonhoeffer’s ecclesiology, essentially a "free church" one, resonates with my own, but is not entirely faithful to all the data. But there can be no doubt about the intrinsic connection between "telling the truth" and acting nonviolently. "I argue," Hauerwas writes, "that the church gives no gift to the world in which it finds itself more politically important than the formation of a people constituted by the virtues necessary to endure the struggle to hear and speak truthfully to one another." Yet, as Bonhoeffer recognized, what it means to "tell the truth" is by no means always obvious. Is it sometimes better for a good man to tell a lie than for a liar to tell the truth, as Bonhoeffer suggests? Read Hauerwas to find out how a Yoder reading would resolve that conundrum.

The sharpest point of disagreement concerns the question whether Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the conspiracy against Hitler signaled a shift away from his earlier pacifist commitment. This raises an important question, namely, what kind of pacifist was Bonhoeffer?

Given that his ethic was not an "ethic of principles," it is difficult to conceive of him as a "principled pacifist" in Yoder’s sense. There was no doubt in the minds of Anabaptist scholars such as Guy Hershberger that this was the case, and it was certainly the opinion of Eberhard Bethge. It is also the opinion of most other students of Bonhoeffer, including Larry Rasmussen, whose work Hauerwas rightly holds in high regard (though I am not sure he is acquainted with Rasmussen’s most recent discussion of the issues). Hauerwas is inclined differently Let us not underestimate the difference, but let us also not allow that difference to cloud the issues that now face us in a world hell-bent on "war on terror."

If we take the Sermon on the Mount seriously, are we not mandated to a life of nonviolence? Should we not be engaged in peacemaking as our Christian vocation? Should not the church be a visible alternative to the world and its ways? On this we must surely agree. But there remains the nagging question that never seems to go away when you are faced, as Bonhoeffer was, with a tyrant in your own backyard (not thousands of miles away) intent on destroying the world and annihilating all those who stand in his way. In this regard I am sorry that Hauerwas did not give us his perspective on Bonhoeffer’s "Structure of Responsible Life," a text that, as far as I can tell, did not inform his discussion very much -- for reasons that are not clear to me.

Bonhoeffer’s reluctant involvement in the conspiracy against Hitler certainly does not provide unambiguous Christian justification for resorting to violence and war. He knew only too well that even a "just war" is still war with all its awful consequences. Rather, Bonhoeffer confronts us as someone who, in following Christ, made a personally costly decision that doing nothing to rid the world of Hitler was worse than doing what he did, however ambiguous the moral issues. That is what peacemaking demanded of him at that time and place. In making that decision he could only "sin boldly" and cast himself on the grace of God.

Meditation as a Subversive Activity

A few years ago I had the opportunity to work for a semester as a chaplain at a Boston jail. My primary work was helping to lead a group of inmates in the practice of silent prayer. I cannot say that I had any particular expectations or resolves about this undertaking before I began it. But by the time my semester came to an end, I learned some wholly unexpected lessons about the transformative power of prayer in a jail setting; about the effects on the body of such personal transformation; and about this country’s systemic racism and how it is in some ways coterminous with the attempt to prevent or repress such transformation.

It might not be immediately obvious that prayer, especially the sustained practice of silent prayer, could effect anything positive in the intimidating context of a jail. Especially odd -- indeed, suspicious -- might seem the act of imposing silence on African-American prisoners. Does not such imposed silence represent the final accommodation to oppression?

Yet one of the most striking features of jail life is the continuous level of noise. Without carpets on the floor, with screams of command from the guards regularly punctuating the atmosphere, and with small three-men cells as the locus of ongoing physical tensions and arguments (homosexual rape is a scandalously regular form of violence), jail offers little opportunity for stillness and peace. Many men find it difficult even to close their eyes in the presence of others they fear. Privacy of a sort can be achieved only by demotion to solitary confinement.

It was in these unpromising conditions that I led one of the silent-meditation groups connected to a remarkable program titled Houses of Healing. The program, following a book of the same name by Robin Casarjian (Houses of Healing A Prisoner’s Guide to Inner Power and Freedom), presents a method of achieving self-knowledge and self-acceptance and of preventing violence. Unlike many such self-help volumes, this book is free of the narcissistic taint of the "me generation"; and unlike many other violence-prevention projects, the book makes it a requirement that, at an early stage of the program, each participant learns to meditate -- to sit in silence for a disciplined period each day, enduring his own inner "noise" and his inner obsessions, fantasies and feelings. For many, this was an entirely new project -- discomforting, challenging and seemingly pointless.

I was asked to provide a short preliminary "teaching" component on Christian silent prayer at the beginning of the hour, an arrangement that enabled the session to count for "good time" (a minor shortening of the prisoner’s sentence). By the end of the term, my "class" had grown from about 15 to over 40; all were African-American or Latino men between the ages of 17 and about 35, with the exception of two older white men (who always came together for mutual support).

On any given day I reckoned that about a third of the men were regular meditators, a third were trying to find their way into the practice, and a third were merely using the opportunity to get out of their cells or amass "good time." Of the latter group, it was always an open question whether those who came to scoff would remain to pray.

Shared silence in peace and solidarity in the context of a jail is possibly the most subversive act of resistance to the jail’s culture of terrorization and violence that one might devise. (Occasionally I would catch the eye of the guard who checked on us at regular intervals through the large picture window into the chapel; his look of sheer wonder and simultaneous suspicion was noteworthy.) I learned too that at least some of the men were profoundly interested in reimagining their "time" as a process of trial and transformation.

Fumbling to find them materials from the history of Christian spirituality that might fire their imagination, I took in a sheet of selected sayings from the desert fathers that stressed the efficacy of simply "remaining in one’s cell" as a purposive means of monastic self-knowledge. They were as intrigued by these sayings as they were to learn that Christian monasticism started in Africa.

Occasionally, as if by miracle, the straining and sweating and shifting of a hard shared silence would transmute into a few minutes of acute and focused stillness. After one such "miracle" a prison social worker (not a Christian) who was with us that day asked: "Why is this so wonderful, and so different, when we do it together?" An older African-American prisoner, Terry, replied, "I’ve only just become a Christian; but doesn’t it say somewhere in the New Testament that when two or three are gathered together Jesus promises to be with us?" I learned that day that such scriptural texts can gain powerful new valency in the prison context.

On another occasion a bright and articulate Latino -- African-American prisoner named Troy gave the practice a try for a whole session but at the end complained, "I must be doing something wrong: all I’m getting is mental jumble." To my delight, some other men immediately jumped in and replied, "No, that’s absolutely right; just keep going." At the end Troy came up to me and said, "I get it. This is to make me patient; this is the opposite of drugs." He didn’t have the language of asceticism, but he had instinctively grasped its essential workings on the apparatus of desire.

Often the sessions were hard work for us all. Many of the men new to the practice found it hard to relax or to bear the inner turmoil that the silence engendered. At such times I felt strongly the influence of my inner group of more experienced practitioners, whose gentleness and poise were the best advertisement for the long-term efficacy of the undertaking. Gentleness, poise, peace and solidarity: these were indeed manifest ways of "bucking the system," if only for a short and blessed interval in the prison day. Remarkably (and maybe this was beginner’s luck), I never felt under any threat from the men, nor was I ever subjected to any inappropriate sexualized remarks, as I had expected.

The men had a lot of interest in discussing body posture for the practice of silence, and how to keep comfortable during a period of silence. Some of my inner group had found that, over time, the practice improved their posture: they held themselves with greater surety and dignity, and with straighter backs. Men who had more recently joined the group thought this "poncy," and there were some (relatively good-hearted) jibes from the neophytes about self-preening and "Buddhist" pretensions of enlightenment.

Most of the men got into the position that a young African-American man is apt to adopt when sitting informally: legs loosely apart, arms splayed, head forward and down. There would be quite a lot of sighing and even some groaning. In one of the early sessions I was suddenly reminded of Elijah’s posture of despair on Mt. Carmel (1 Kings 18:42) and of the later Christian hesychasts’ imitation of this posture in the practice of the Jesus prayer -- their theory being that the posture expressed physically the "bringing of the mind down into the heart."

The next week I risked taking in a sheet with a copy of a medieval manuscript drawing of a hesychast praying in this posture, along with a short section from Gregory Palamas’s Triads on the christological theory of the practice (the heart being the center of the self where Christ comes to take up his dwelling). I was amazed and moved when several of the men responded positively to this material, since I was all along well aware that -- to the extent that some of them had Christian backgrounds or had even become Christians in jail -- such traditions of silence within Christianity would be far removed from the affective and sometimes noisy spirituality of much African-American Protestantism. Surprisingly, however, I met no suspicion from the prisoners such as I encounter among liberal Protestant Harvard students, for whom the practice of silence must inevitably mean being silenced. I think this was because, for the reasons suggested above, in jail the practice was mostly experienced by the men as empowering.

What ultimately surprised me more, therefore, and what emerged from the intense interest in bodily posture, was the men’s intuitive understanding of the physical and psychical changes wrought in them by the practice over time, and the personal and political potential of such changes. They laughed initially at the promise in The Cloud of Unknowing that such practice would make the ugliest person magnetically attractive; but I noticed that my inner group readily assented to this idea. I was left wondering, by the end of the semester, how not only individual bodies but the body politic could be affected by such "beautifying." What if the physical poise, calm and self-control that had been gained in such "miraculous" solidarity in jail could be maintained outside? Indeed, the question the men most often asked me was where they could find such a group when they got out of jail.

My final piece of learning was about race. What I already knew notionally I saw with my own eyes: that up to half of the young nonwhite men in the area surrounding the jail would at some point pass through this correctional institution, mostly for minor offenses, with the upper limit a 30-month sentence. Within the jail these prisoners would experience brutalizing violence, often of a sexual nature, and a high incidence of accompanying despair, mental illness, degradation and further criminalization. While "doing their time" they would also be indirectly contributing to the Boston economy by engaging in low-paid manual work both inside and outside the jail. Yet on leaving jail they would have little more in their pockets than what they had come in with. Their future lives, to say the least, had little prospect of worldly success or respectability; yet many already had responsibilities to wives, girlfriends and small children. The temptation to return to the drug scene, to gang life, to thieving or other criminal activity would for many prove predictably overwhelming. Boston does not have a significant African-American middle-class population.

As I saw all this, and saw too the effects of the regular practice of meditation on at least some of the men, I made a connection as a theologian -- speculative, to be sure -- that I had not seen before. It occurred to me that if (as Cornel West and others have argued) it was the Enlightenment that created the category of race (dividing "white" from "black" and subordinating the latter to the former), it was also the Enlightenment that repressed the epistemological and religious significance of contemplation in the mystical theology of premodern writers. Whereas the influence of such as Denys the Areopagite had been hugely significant in the medieval and early modern Catholic thought of Western Christendom -- "dark contemplation" being seen as supremely and personally transformative, at least for a minority monastic circle -- the secularized philosophy of Kant relegated to the unavailable realm of the "noumenal" that which is dark to the mind, and had shorn away reference to prayer as a profound exercise of transformation.

This symbolic Enlightenment connection between race and disempowered "darkness" seemed suddenly theologically and politically important. Even if my intellectual history is questionable, the collocation of ideas gave me a key to understanding why the practice of silent solidarity might have deep political as well as personal effects: the unleashing of "dark," subversive divine power as the antidote to racist despair, marginalization and repression is symbolically encoded in this practice. The birth of the modern prison system (another product of the Enlightenment) was predicated on the possibility of penitential reformation. But this is a goal of which the postmodern system of punitive policing and imprisoning of large segments of the nonwhite population seems to have despaired. It was the band of chaplains, social workers and educational volunteers in this institution of "correction" who refused to give up hope of change in the face of terrible political odds.

I am fully aware of the violent and criminal capacities of the prisoners I briefly served. "We’re all wicked here," as one of my white prisoners remarked with laconic realism, and no one troubled to correct him. But I also write with a strong sense of the Calvinist tradition’s striking awareness of the ingrained and pervasive nature of original sin and of that same tradition’s insistence that our salvation is worked out in the publicly responsible realm of city and state.

Sometimes I wondered, as I worked in the jail, whether the particular form of Calvinism that has passed into the fabric of American society, adjusted to accommodate a strong commitment to the supposed separation of church and state, has not forgotten John Calvin’s stern insistence that the sacrificial punishment taken on voluntarily by Christ on the cross does not need to be repeated. It is by access to that one, unrepeatable "punishment" that we are, by grace, transformed. This is not to reject, as some do, the very existence of institutions of imprisonment for dangerous criminals; but it is to resist the notion that violent and degrading punishment should continue after the prisoner has been sentenced.

The theological question that presses, then, is this one: How can that original Calvinist vision of Christ’s voluntary substitution be reactivated in a country that not only condones but almost invisibly re-instantiates punitive racism through its judicial system? How can what seems a non-theological matter -- the fate of black prisoners -- be perceived as the outcome of certain implicit theological and ideological choices? How can the rampant individualism of a capitalist culture be brought to the Christian bar of responsibility for the whole? And how can the predatory abuse of human power in prisons against the most vulnerable in their midst be turned so as to allow willed spiritual vulnerability to be empowered by grace?

At the end of my time in prison chaplaincy, I had become a different sort of theologian, as well as a different sort of minister. I had seen certain patient practices of transformation work seemingly miraculous change in the souls and bodies of some young men, and I had seen them discern both the personal and the political potential of such change. But I had no illusions about such silence as an overarching panacea for the deep layers of racist oppression that the culture of the jail both presumes and re-instantiates. Change of a substantial nature would require political will of far-reaching range and significance.

Nonetheless, my own theological goals and plans were revised. I saw that in reworking the doctrines of sin and atonement in the systematic theology I was planning to write, I had to address head-on the ways that postmodern society, through the arm of the state, aims to punish and heal. The institutions of prison and hospital, which Calvin’s Geneva did much to reformulate in modern guise, cannot be ignored. Nor can the more cynical views of repressive power proposed by Michel Foucault in relation to prison and asylum go without a Christian theological response. These institutions are a mark of our civilization or lack of it; the averted Christian gaze is a guilty one. Despite the much-vaunted disjunction between church and state in America, civic duties to the polis are a binding Christian responsibility.

Finally, I saw that I could not even write the rather technical section of my systematic theology on religious epistemology, and on the significance of "dark" practices of contemplation for religious "knowing," without also attending to race. I could no longer write a treatise on the way the mind is "darkened" en route to a fuller acquaintance with God without also writing on that which has been made "black" (epistemologically, politically, socially) in modern American religious history. Such a combination may seem a strange diptych, conjoining analysis of the transformative epistemology of Carmelites (Teresa and John of the Cross) with an exploration of the origins of "race"; but this strange undertaking I shall have to risk if I am to be true to what I learned in the jail.

No one who works in a jail can fail to feel the heavy weight of despair and hopelessness endemic to prison culture. But trust and hope are hard to kill completely, and I am glad that I witnessed in these men something of the irrepressible dignity of the human spirit before God.

The Strange World of Conspiracy Theories

Book Review:

A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America.

By Michael Barkun. University of California Press, 238 pp.

Text:

One of my graduate school professors, commenting on a historian famous for his prolific reading and reviewing of recent work in American history, said, "We should be grateful to him. He reads all those books so the rest of us don’t have to." On that principle, we owe profound gratitude to Michael Barkun, who has spent years immersed in some very strange publications and Web sites.

More than any other scholar in America, Barkun, a political scientist at Syracuse University, knows his way around the arcane world of contemporary conspiracy theorists. His 1994 book Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement is highly regarded. The interests of the community he examines in this new work go far beyond garden-variety speculation about the Kennedy assassination or the death of Vincent Foster. These folks take seriously the existence of UFOs; FEMA concentration camps; the UN’s secret fleet of black helicopters; mind control through microchip implants; mysterious cattle mutilations; occult symbolism in the Washington, D.C., street grid; and satanic imagery in the Denver airport terminal. In this world the 19th-century "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" remains hot news, along with "MJ12," a supposed secret memo describing the government’s UFO cover-up. "Let no crank be left behind" sometimes seems Barkun’s guiding principle.

Barkun gives us a Cook’s tour of this psychedelic world, pointing out how the many varieties of conspiracy theory have evolved, diverged and intersected. He plumbs the Internet, clearly a godsend to conspiracy theorists. There they can discover each other, share and critique each other’s ideas and create their own subculture, where the fact that outsiders find their notions utterly bizarre is irrelevant.

A Culture of Conspiracy is in the tradition of studies of the cultural underground, including such works as Norman Cohn’s Pursuit of the Millennium (1957). a survey of medieval apocalypticism officially rejected by the church, and Robert Darnton’s history of pornography, The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (1995). Students of 19th-century American sex reformers work a similar vein. Barkun’s venture into this genre has yielded impressive results.

In an opening theoretical discussion, he characterizes conspiracy belief as an attempt "to delineate and explain evil," guided by three basic principles: Nothing happens by accident; nothing is as it seems; and everything is connected. Insisting on the cultural importance of "stigmatized knowledge," he looks at the history of this tradition, going back to the Order of Illuminists founded in 1776 by Bavarian law professor Adam Weishaupt to free mankind "from all established religious and political authority." The "Bavarian Illuminati" soon disappeared, but their ideas have enjoyed a rich afterlife among conspiracy theorists, in works often marked by anti-Semitic overtones.

In recent years, in a process of "improvisational millennialism,’ this venerable strand of world-conspiratory speculation has been combined with theories of visitations by space aliens. Barkun traces this breakthrough to a "not entirely coherent" 1978 work by Stan Deyo, an American living in Australia. Far more influential in grafting UFO belief onto conspiratorial thought to form a "superconspiracy" theory was Milton William Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse (1988), currently ranked 11,825 on Amazon.com, which means it is still selling nicely after 15 years.

Barkun devotes several chapters to the recent evolution of this hybrid superconspiracy theory, which includes a variant -- derived from 1920s pulp fiction with an assist from Tolkien -- in which the conspirators are not space aliens but reptilian creatures from Inner Earth who take on human form. Barkun finds a bright side to this development: if the sinister beings seeking to control the world come from UFOs or Inner Earth, more mundane villains are left off the hook. Indeed. anti-Semitic themes have declined with the injection of theories about aliens into the conspiracy scenario.

Demonstrating the patience of Job, Barkun only occasionally ventures a mild judgment. One Inner-Earth theorist, he suggests, "seems clearly to have been delusional" -- an assessment that some might apply to practically every figure in the book. Where a less conscientious scholar might simply have dismissed this subculture as a realm of kooks, obsessives and the certifiably insane, worthy only of jeering ridicule, Barkun patiently discusses each book and Web site, tracing the elaboration of ever more fantastic theories. However bizarre, he argues, these ideas must be taken seriously, since they can influence action and, in diluted form, they work their way into the cultural mainstream.

Nevertheless, I pursued a running argument with Barkun: he was wasting too much intellectual energy on the lunatic fringe. (I thought of a nifty title for my hypothetical review: "Barkun Up the Wrong Tree.") The big story in contemporary apocalypticism, I told myself, is not UFOs and creepy-crawlies from Inner Earth, but John Darby’s dispensationalism. which enjoys enormous influence, thanks to popularizations like Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) and the bestselling Left Behind novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. Yet dispensationalism is only passingly noted by Barkun.

Questions of relative cultural influence are important. Oddly appealing as they are, Barkun’s wild improvisers are simply not in the same league with LaHaye and Jenkins, with sales of 55 million and counting. The Left Behind series is The Late Great Planet Earth on steroids. Borders, Barnes & Noble, Wal-Mart and Amazon.com, not to mention thousands of Christian bookstores, are selling these books like hotcakes, along with those of other Bible prophecy popularizers, including the indefatigable Lindsey.

Unlike Barkan’s dizzyingly eclectic theorists, the Left Behind books are firmly grounded in a view familiar to generations of fundamentalists. LaHaye and his "Pretribulation Research Center" in San Diego insist that the Book of Revelation offers a literal road map to coming events, complete with a darkened sun, falling stars, beasts from the sea, rivers of blood, Gog’s invasion of Israel, the drying up of the Euphrates and the Beast’s world dictatorship under the sinister number 666. For LaHaye, Revelation is no allegory or first-century Christian wishful thinking about Rome’s destruction. All of it will literally be fulfilled in the future. The Left Behind novels scrupulously follow this interpretation.

Dispensationalism’s political and cultural impact is indisputable. As Joan Didion has documented (New York Review of Books, November 6, 2003), Bible-prophecy believers constitute a vital segment of President Bush’s supporters, and Bush himself seems convinced that his elevation to the Oval Office and his every action since have been determined by God. Before announcing his candidacy, he met with leaders of the "Council for National Policy," a shadowy right-wing Christian group of which Tim LaHaye is a co-founder.

The Internet is a great leveler, as Barkun notes, but not all Web sites (or books) are equal. Barkun believes that the Internet has enabled his improvisers to reach "a vastly broader audience." But a proliferation of Web sites does not prove an expanded audience, and even by the most generous assessment of their influence, they lag far, far behind the Left Behind juggernaut.

Nevertheless, as I thought further about my distinction between the dispensationalists and Barkun’s "improvisational" crew, I decided that on the epistemological level the differences may not be so great. While most of Barkun’s theorists ignore the standard dispensationalist practice of documenting their scenarios with scriptural citations, biblical themes and imagery pervade their work. The appeal of Behold a Pale Horse, for example, certainly lies in part in its title, a quote from Revelation 6:8: "And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him."

The "new world order" conspiracy theories clearly draw upon the Revelation account of the Beast; abduction-by-aliens tales evoke the rapture; and persons who report messages from aliens offer a variant of numerous biblical accounts of direct communication from God. The reptiles from Inner Earth recall both the scorpion-like creatures who swarm from the bottomless pit in Revelation 9 and the Genesis account of Satan appearing as a serpent. Even the pariah status of these beliefs echoes a Christian theme: the truth is revealed to despised outcasts and ridiculed by the great. In short, the Judeo-Christian template of this material seems clear. Though Barkun briefly notes these connections, they bear further exploration.

To make the same point from the other direction: How different, really, are the bestselling popularizers writing within an ostensibly Christian interpretive tradition and Barkun’s non-Christian theorists? As Barkun notes, Pat Robertson’s 1991 bestseller The New World Order portrays history as a vast conspiracy originating with the Masons and the Bavarian Illuminati and continuing through the Rothchilds, the first Congress (which emblazoned that sinister motto Novus Ordo Seclorum on the Great Seal of the United States), the Federal Reserve Board, the UN, the Trilateral Commission and the Beatles. Arno Froese of Midnight Call Ministries, through many paperback books, Midnight Call magazine and prophecy conferences at pricey resort hotels, promulgates theories about computers, new surveillance technologies and Washington’s post-9/11 antiterrorist measures as anticipations of the Antichrist. These differ little from Barkun’s theorists. The convention that requires dispensationalists to cite biblical authority constrains them somewhat, but has not unduly limited them as they apply their imaginative powers to the hermeneutic task.

Lest we too readily dismiss conspiracy theorists, it is well to recall the record of real conspiracies, skullduggery and deception in recent public life. The 1940 Smith Act authorized concentration camps for dissidents in national emergencies. The FBI tapped Martin Luther King’s phones. The Atomic Energy Commission funded secret radiological experiments on institutionalized children. Star Wars researchers faked test results. Watergate, Iran-contra, corporate criminality, the mendacious arguments for the war on Iraq -- the list of deceptions is a long one.

Nor does the notion of an all-powerful world system seem unduly bizarre in this era of global corporations, instant money transfers, gargantuan media conglomerates and the WTO. Indeed, the worldview of Barkun’s cast of characters parallels that of New Leftists of the 1960s, with their talk of the Establishment, or the contemporary work of Noam Chomsky. According to Amazon.com, buyers of Jim Marrs’s Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History that Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids (2000) are also purchasing Chomsky’s World Orders Old and New (1996). The conspiratorial-minded, in short, find ample grist in contemporary history.

In our allegedly secular culture, one finds conspiratorial themes and alien visitors in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and, more recently, TV’s X-Files series ("Trust No One"), the Matrix films, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E. T. (1982). As for popular receptivity to "stigmatized" knowledge, Barkun cites polls suggesting that about half of Americans believe in UFOs. And it is worth recalling that not so long ago a U.S. president’s schedule was being planned by an astrologer.

Barkun is certainly right to emphasize the way these ideas filter into the cultural mainstream, but caveats suggest themselves. As ideas are "diluted" for popular consumption they also change until, perhaps, like 19th-century homeopathic nostrums, they lose their potency. How large is the core group of true believers, and how does the process of diffusion beyond this core actually work? Did people who enjoyed the X-Files or Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-drenched JFK graduate to the "hard core" conspiracy material? Certainly some deeply conspiratorial works such as Behold a Pale Horse have won a large audience. Marrs’s Rule by Secrecy currently clocks in at an impressive 3,966 in Amazon.com’s sales rankings. Are these breakthroughs typical of a larger pattern, or rare exceptions? Clearly, no definite line separates Barkun’s theorists from the mainstream. They are simply particularly intense and single-minded advocates of ideas that in diluted dosages drip steadily into the nation’s cultural bloodstream.

Potent cultural forces do resist these conspiracy theorists, from skeptical ridicule to fundamentalist objections about their lack of a biblical foundation. In One Nation After All (1998), sociologist Alan Wolfe cautioned that we over-emphasize the extremes of American discourse and neglect the moderate middle ground. This reminder is worth keeping in mind.

Like all good works of scholarship, A Culture of Conspiracy raises questions and invites further research. For example, could not this conspiracy material be more fully placed in historical context? The first UFO sightings came amidst the postwar Red Scare, when the nation was obsessed with the fear of traitors among us. Government propaganda encouraged an apocalyptic worldview during the cold war, as it does now, when we wage an open-ended "war on terrorism." And is it coincidental that "increasingly conspiratorial motifs" appeared in UFO speculation just after the Watergate scandal?

Does the psychiatric literature shed light on personality types that are particularly susceptible to conspiracy thinking, or on the appeal of Gnostic subcultures that claim to possess secret knowledge? What demographic or geographic patterns characterize this subculture? Beyond Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo, discussed by Barkun, do similar theories occur in other cultures? Within the U.S., how does this tradition relate to African-American conspiracy theories, from Elijah Muhammed’s teaching that whites are devils to the more recent myth that AIDS began as a white conspiracy to kill Africans, or Amiri Baraka’s suggestion that Jews had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks?

Barkun briefly raises an important point in his conclusion when he notes "the absence of formal organization" among these conspiracy theorists. Very few have founded institutions to perpetuate their beliefs. This remains a virtual community thriving on the Internet and discussing a common body of work, but otherwise unconnected. Here Barkun’s subjects differ markedly from the dispensationalists, with their strong institutional base in fundamentalist and charismatic churches. But lack of organizational structure has some advantages: it frees conspiracy theorists to modify and revise their theories at will, to disseminate them with lightning speed, and to win recruits unencumbered by any obligation to contribute to a formal institution.

One wonders to what extent these beliefs are transmitted across generations -- a key element in the tenacity of apocalyptic beliefs embraced by established religious bodies. Children who grow up in dispensationalist churches are more likely to adopt these beliefs themselves. Does this process of generational continuity work when beliefs are purveyed on the Web or by books alone?

Finally, to draw on Robert Alan Goldberg’s Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America (2001), one wonders whether American culture particularly encourages this type of thinking. Conspiratorial strands certainly pervade our myths of origins. The New England Puritans saw themselves as escaping a corrupt established church. The Declaration of Independence denounces the wicked conspiracy led by George III -- the "royal beast" of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense -- to destroy American freedom. Historians Richard Hofstadter and John Higham have documented 19th-century nativist and conspiracy thinking. Barkun’s theorists, intent on smoking out the evil that threatens our beloved city on a hill, are a part of this deep-rooted tradition. If conspiracy thinking is indeed inscribed in our national DNA what does that tell us? The paradox of "Trust No One" is that you cannot trust even the person who tells you to trust no one. One ends -- as Tocqueville observed long ago -- imprisoned within one’s self, viewing the outside world with narrow-eyed suspicion.

Studiously nonjudgmental for the most part, Barkun concludes on a somber note:

The danger lies less in such beliefs themselves . . . than in the behavior they might stimulate or justify. As long as the New World Order appeared to be almost but not quite a reality, devotees of conspiracy theories could be expected to confine their activities to propagandizing. On the other hand, should they believe that the prophesied evil day had in fact arrived, their behavior would become far more difficult to predict.

One is reminded of Pat Robertson’s recent comment in interviewing the author of a book denouncing the State Department: "If I could just get a nuclear device inside Foggy Bottom, I think that would be the answer." And, as Barkun reports, before Timothy McVeigh parked that Ryder truck outside the federal building in Oklahoma City, he had visited not only the charred remains of the Branch Davidian site at Waco but also "Area 51," the secret government installation in Nevada that fascinates conspiracy theorists. Ideas, even bizarre and marginalized ideas, do have consequences, and we ignore them at our peril. Barkun’s explorations, like the canary in the coal mine, warn us of what may lie ahead. Today’s bizarre theory may become tomorrow’s blueprint for action.

Long Goodbye (John 17:20-26; Acts 16:16-34)

How do you say goodbye? It depends, I suppose, on the relationship -- what it has grown to and what it will become. For Jesus, preparing to leave the close society of his disciples seems to have been a long process. Almost from the beginning he gently, or sometimes in exasperation, explained that the course his life was following would lead to profound changes in their lives. So he began saying goodbye early.

When families get together to say farewell to someone moving away, or to celebrate the last few days of someone’s single life before marriage, they often rummage around and get out old photographs. These pictures stimulate an extended round of reminiscence -- where holidays were spent, the worst car journey, Aunt So-and-So’s funeral. Before an impending change, people tend to reflect on how they got to where they are. They are preparing to say "Goodbye."

Jesus’ final conversations before his arrest are like family gatherings. One member is reminiscing about where family members are now and how they got there. Look how these memories fit in with what I have been saying to you, Jesus says. Remember that I was always with you, but that soon I will be with you in a different way. Say goodbye to the old way.

When a girl who can tell fortunes starts following St. Paul around as he goes to prayer in Philippi, shouting that these men are servants of God and have come to tell the citizens how to be saved, Paul loses his temper and tells the spirit that gave her this insight to come out. That meant no more fortune-telling, no more payments to her masters from people desperate to have some control over their futures, or at least to see them coming. They would have to say goodbye to all that.

Maybe Paul was annoyed that his well-argued intellectual persuasion and the witness of the disciples’ own conduct were overshadowed by this girl’s act. How can people change their lives and make an important commitment on the basis of a parlor trick? Unthinkable. As a consequence, the slave girl has to say good-bye to her old way of life, to the extra favor that her fortune-telling brought her. She stops being "the slave girl who tells fortunes" and becomes nearer to being herself -- not to the task she performs but the person that she is. We don’t even know her name. Afterwards she fades from the story.

She may have had to say goodbye to being of some importance in society, but she also needed to welcome a new future. We don’t know if she acted on her insight into Paul and Silas’s mission and became a follower, but the jailer did. He threw all his eggs into one basket and brought his whole family into the family of the baptized. It was an immediate and complete rejection of the old life and an embrace of the new. There was great joy in that household, but also a release from fear, the fear of failure that would cause a family man to attempt to take his own life. The fear that would make people want someone else to tell them what was going to happen in their lives, and no doubt also to tell them what to do and who to pay to change any unpleasant predictions. The jailer’s fear was replaced by a trust in God.

I live on a small island off the west coast of Scotland. There are two centers on the island of bun that are run on behalf of a scattered religious community of the same name, and up to 100 guests are received here each week. It is neither a conference nor a retreat center, but a place where we build community by living, working, worshiping and socializing together. Each week the community changes, bringing different people with different attributes, foibles, likes and opinions. Each week we say goodbye to the departing members of the community and wave to them as the feriy bobs its way across the water. Each week deep relationships are cultivated and then let go as guests return to their normal lives.

Even those of us in the small group of long-term staff who stay for one or three years must eventually say goodbye. We all know this when we arrive, but it’s still difficult. Iona is a place to be, and then the place from which we are sent out into the wider world. We welcome the fact that we are changed, that we are saying goodbye to what has been formed in the past and acknowledging how the past brought us to where we are now. It was good, it is over, so where do we go now? We can still be present in each other’s lives, but our methods of communication are less immediate -- letters, phone calls, e-mails.

John thought that it was important to remind those who had never met Jesus in the flesh that Jesus was still present, but in a new way. Not in the way that he had been, but in a real way, in an immediate way, in the constantly forming community of believers reflecting the oneness of Jesus with the Father in their own relationship with Christ. They were invited to accept the love of God in fellowship, just as Jesus accepted the free flow of love with the Father.

It’s like a family settling down for one last celebration of "now" before they move into the future, with the advantages of knowing themselves better and knowing who is going with them.

Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God? Part Three

(In late 2003 President Bush said, in response to a reporter’s question, that he believed Muslims and Christians "worship the same God." The remark sparked criticism from some Christians, who thought Bush was being politically correct but theologically inaccurate. For example, Ted Haggard, bead of the National Association of Evangelicals, said, "The Christian God encourages freedom, love, forgiveness, prosperity and health. The Muslim god appears to value the opposite."

Do Muslims and Christians worship the same God? The question raises a fundamental issue in interfaith discussion, especially for monotheists. We asked several scholars to consider the question. J. Dudley Woodberry’s article is the third in a series.)

In comparing Muslim and Christian beliefs it is helpful to distinguish between 1) the Being to whom we refer and 2) what we understand about the character and actions of that Being in the two faiths. As monotheists we both refer to the One and only Creator God, but what we understand about the character and actions of God are significantly different.

As to the One to whom we refer: when the Qur’an speaks of God, it means the One Creator God of the Bible, the God of Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac and Jacob (2:136). To the Jews and Christians the Qur’an says, "We believe in the revelation that has come down to us and that which came down to you; our God and your God are One, and it is to Him that we bow" (29:46). Furthermore, it adopted the name for God ("Allah") that Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews used and still use.

Muslims such as the late Isma’il al-Fariqi say that in Islam God reveals only his will, not himself. Christians, on the other hand, believe that God desires to reveal himself, and would contend that the fact that humans are made in the image of God (Gen. 1:27), even if fallen, provides some basis for some understanding of his character. The Qur’an does not state that humans are created in the image of God, although later traditions attributed to Muhammad (hadith) do. The Qur’an instead says "nothing is like him" (42:11), and he speaks "from behind a veil" (42:51).

"The most beautiful names of God" that appear in Muslim devotion have been used by Muslim theologians to express God’s attributes even though they are more expressions of praise than doctrinal statements. But those names can provide windows to allow some comparison of Muslim and Christian understandings of the character and actions of God.

When we look at similar descriptions in the two faiths, we see that they are not always as similar as they may at first appear. While both scriptures affirm that God is One (Qur’an 112:1; Deut. 6:4; Mark 12:29), they do not agree on how that unity is expressed. Both traditions consider God to be transcendent above his creation (Qur’an 42:11; Isa. 6:1). The Qur’an expresses God’s immanence by saying that God is "the Lord of the heavens and the earth" (19:65) and nearer to people than their jugular vein (50:16). Yet outside of Sufi mysticism the closeness of God to humans is not developed in Islam. By contrast, in the Gospels the incarnation of Jesus the Christ is understood as "Emmanuel . . . God is with us" (Matt. 1:23). This, of course, has implications for how God guides (Qur’an 22:54; Ps. 48:14) and reveals himself, whether primarily in words (Qur’an 12:2; Heb. 1) or also in flesh (Heb. 1:2; John 14:9).

A third cluster of descriptions of God has to do with the common themes of mercy (Qur’an 23:109; Num. 14:18) and love (Qur’an 85:14; I John 4:8), which both scriptures at times make conditional (Qur’an 5:3; 3:31-32; Exod. 20:5-6). However, the Bible goes beyond this position to describe God as initialing love and giving his Son (1 John 4:10) while we were still sinners (Rom. 5:8).

A fourth common point is the description of the power of God (Qur’an 2:20; 1 Chron. 29:11-12), which is seen as control over all things. But in the Bible it is also expressed as a vulnerable power: the cross is the power of God for those being saved through it (1 Cor. 1:18). Then God’s power over death is shown by his raising Jesus from the dead (Eph. 1:19-20). Finally, God in Christ refuses to force his way into lives with his power: "Behold, I. stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me" (Rev. 3:20). Fellowship is what he desires.

We have looked at examples of descriptions of God that the Qur’an and Bible hold in common but which also turn out to be different on closer examination. Now we turn to descriptions that are clearly different. These include the New Testament portrayal of a divine triunity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We need to remember that Jews who have not followed Christ also reject these beliefs; yet most Christians would say that they worship the same God but have incomplete knowledge of him. Thus, to return to the original question, Christians, Muslims and Jews as monotheists refer to the same Being when they refer to God -- the Creator God of Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac and Jacob. But in significant ways they do not have the same understanding about him, even though they also agree in significant ways.

We have framed much of the comparison of the understanding of God around "the most beautiful names" of God used in Muslim devotion, but which for the most part express aspects of God that Jews, Christians and Muslims hold in common. This phrase is found on the eastern gate of the Muslim shrine called the Dome of the Bock, located on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, a place sacred to all three faiths. It is on Mt. Moriah where Abraham took his son to sacrifice him before God provided a substitute -- a story that lends meaning to those names in all three traditions.

Beneath the Rock of the shrine is a cave with a hole in the top, which is almost undoubtedly the foundation of the Altar of Burnt Offering of the Jewish Temple -- the cave being "the hollow or pit . . . under the altar" which gathered the blood from the sacrificed lambs together with the water from ablutions. This further enriches the meaning of these names in two of the three faiths.

Beside that hill is another hill called Calvary, beneath which is an empty tomb. These facts add a profound new dimension of meaning for one faith to the names that the followers of all three faiths use in worshiping the God of Abraham.

An Argument for Gay Marriage

I want to consider gay marriage by first reflecting on the theology of marriage, and I want to reflect on the theology of marriage under the rubric of sanctification. This approach is consistent with the tradition of the Orthodox Church, which regards marriage as a way of participating in the divine life not by way of sexual satisfaction but by way of ascetic self-denial for the sake of more desirable goods. Theologically understood, marriage is not primarily for the control of lust or for procreation. It is a discipline whereby we give ourselves to another for the sake of growing in holiness -- for, more precisely, the sake of God.

In this respect marriage and monasticism are two forms of the same discipline, as the Orthodox writer Paul Evdokimov has argued. They are both ways of committing ourselves to others -- a spouse or a monastic community -- from whom we cannot easily escape. Both the monastic and the married give themselves over to be transformed by the perceptions of others; both seek to learn, over time, by the discipline of living with others something about how God perceives human beings.

Rowan Williams has written, "Grace, for the Christian believer, is a transformation that depends in large part on knowing yourself to be seen in a certain way: as significant, as wanted. The whole story of creation, incarnation, and our incorporation into the fellowship of Christ’s body tells us that God desires us, as if we were God, as if we were that unconditional response to God’s giving that God’s [Son] makes in the life of the Trinity. We are created [and we marry] so that we may be caught up in this, so that we may grow into the wholehearted love of God by learning that God loves us as God loves God." Like all forms of asceticism, this is a high-risk endeavor. It can expose the worst in people -- so that it can be healed.

Sexuality, in short, is for sanctification, that is, for God. It is to be a means by which God catches human beings up into the community of God’s Spirit and the identity of God’s child. Monogamy and monasticism are two ways of embodying features of the triune life in which God initiates, responds to and celebrates love.

Monasticism is for people who find a bodily, sexual sanctification first and foremost in the desirous perception of God. Marriage is for people who find themselves transformed by the desirous perception of another human being made in God’s image. In a marital or monastic community, the parties commit themselves to practicing faith, hope and charity in a situation in which those virtues get plenty of opportunity to be exercised.

This way of understanding the Christian life obviously takes seriously the embodied character of human life. And embodiment implies diversity. The Holy Spirit characteristically rests on bodies: the body of Christ in Jesus, in the church, in the sacraments and in the saints. As the Spirit forms the bodies of human beings into the body of Christ, she characteristically gathers the diverse and diversifies the corporate, making members of one body.

We can see the Holy Spirit working for a harmonious diversity as she hovers over the waters in creation. Let us suppose that "Be fruitful and multiply" applies to the commands "Let the earth put forth vegetation" and "Let the waters bring forth swarms" and "Let the earth bring forth everything that creeps upon the ground" (Gen.1:26, 1:11, 1:20, 1:24). In all these cases, the earth and the waters bring forth things different from themselves, not just more dirt and more water. And in all these cases, they bring forth a variety of things: one might almost translate the phrase as "Be fruitful and diversify."

Christian thinkers have argued against the notion that the diversity of creatures and persons is the result of the Fall rather than of God’s creation of a multifarious world, Aquinas represents a prominent strand of Christian thought on this point: the earthly environment demands to be filled with an ordered variety of creatures, he said, so that God’s creation will not suffer the imperfection of showing gaps.

Creatures require the diversity that the Spirit rejoices to evoke. Multiplication is always in God’s hand, so that the multiplication of the loaves and the fishes, the fruit of the virgin’s womb, the diversity of the natural world does not overturn nature but parallels, diversifies and celebrates it. The Spirit’s transformation of the elements of a sacrament is just a special case of the Spirit’s rule over all of God’s creation.

What kind of diversity or otherness does the Spirit evoke? Does it evoke the diversity represented by homosexual persons? Clearly, the majority opinion of the church has said no -- that sort of diversity in creation is not the work of the Spirit. But it is not at all clear that such a judgment is necessary.

Conservatives will suppose that by invoking the diversity of creation I am begging the question. And yet, if the earth is to bring forth not according to its kind (more dirt) but creatures different from dirt and from each other, and if bodily differences among creatures are intended to represent a plenum in which every niche is filled, then the burden of proof lies on the other side. It needs to be shown that one of God’s existing entities somehow cannot do its part in communicating and representing God’s goodness and do so precisely in its finitude, by its limitations.

What are the limits on accepting diversity as capable of representing God’s goodness? Conservatives and liberals would agree that a diversity evoked by the Holy Spirit must be a holy diversity, a diversity ordered to the good, one that brings forth the fruits of the Spirit, primarily faith, hope and charity.

Given that no human beings exhibit faith, hope and charity on their own, but only in community, it is hard to argue that gay and lesbian people ought to be left out of social arrangements, such as marriage, in which these virtues are trained. In the words of Gregory of Nazianzus, our human limitations are intended for our good. So too, then, the limitations ascribed to same-sex couples, or for that matter cross-sex couples: in Gregory’s words, their "very limitations are a form of training" toward communicating and representing the good.

The church needs both biological and adoptive parents, especially since baptism is a type of adoption. The trick is to turn these created limits toward the appreciation of the goods represented by others. Our differences are meant to make us yearn for and love one another. Says Williams:

"The life of the Christian community has as its rationale -- if not invariably its practical reality -- the task of teaching us to so order our relations that human beings may see themselves as desired, as the occasion of joy."

Perhaps the signal case of the blessing of diversity is God’s promise to Abraham that by him all the nations of the earth would become blessings to one another (Gen. 18:18). The promise to Abraham interprets "otherness" as primarily moral, in the sense that the other is the one that sanctifies -- difference is intended for blessing.

Under conditions of sin, otherness can lead to curse rather than blessing, to hostility rather than hospitality. Certainly there has been enough cursing and hostility to go around in the sexuality debates. But as created, otherness is intended for blessing and hospitality.

For large sections of various Christian traditions, blessing does not float overhead. Sanctification comes through concrete practices of asceticism, a discipline or training through which lesser goods serve greater ones. This asceticism is not a bizarre, antiquated Christian weirdness. Americans are already deeply if sometimes mistakenly invested in one kind of asceticism: dieting and working out at the gym are physical disciplines that are supposed to bring spiritual benefits. Indeed, they are supposed by some to bring the greatest of these, love. Surely there are more effective disciplines than those.

To reflect trinitarian holiness, sanctification must involve community. It involves commitments to a community from which one can’t easily escape, whether monastic, nuptial or congregational. (The New Testament devalues commitments to one’s family of origin.) Even hermits and solitaries tend to follow the liturgy, the community’s prayer. The first hermit, Anthony the Great, emerged from solitude with an increased sociality, so that people were drawn to him. His "heart had achieved total transparency to others" (in the words of Peter Brown).

Gay and lesbian people who commit themselves to a community -- to a church, or to one another as partners -- do so to seek greater goods, to embark upon a discipline, to donate themselves to a greater social meaning. Living out these commitments under conditions of sin, in a community from which one can’t easily escape -- especially a community such as marriage, and monasticism -- is not likely to be straightforwardly improving. The community from which one can’t easily escape is morally risky. It tends to expose the worst in people. The hope is that community exposes the worst in people in order that the worst can be healed.

Christians will see such healing as the work of Christ. Many Christian traditions portray Christ as a physician who must probe people’s wounds in order to heal them. For example, St. Romanos the Melodist offers this account of Christ explaining his mission to his mother at the foot of the cross:

Be patient a little longer, Mother, and you will see how, like a physician, . . . I treat their wounds, cutting with the lance their calluses and their scabs. And I take [the] vinegar, I apply it as astringent to the wound, when with the probe of the nails I have investigated the cut, I shall plug it with the cloak. And, with my cross as a splint, I shall make use of it, Mother, so that you may chant with understanding, "By suffering he has abolished suffering, my Son and my God" (from On the Lament of the Mother of God).

For the risk of commitment to be worth it and to have the best chance of success, the community must have plenty of time and be made up of the right sort of people. Growth takes a lifetime. The right sort of people are those who will succeed in exposing and healing one another’s flaws.

For gay and lesbian people, the right sort of otherness is unlikely to be represented by someone of the opposite sex, because only someone of the apposite, not opposite, sex will get deep enough into the relationship to expose one’s vulnerabilities and inspire the trust that healing requires. The crucial question is, What sort of created diversity will lead one to holiness?

The answer is no doubt as various as creation itself. But certainly same-sex couples find the right spur to vulnerability, self-exposure, and the long and difficult commitment over time to discover themselves in the perceptions of another -- they find all this in someone of the same sex. Theologically, says theologian David McCarthy, a homosexual orientation is this: "Gay men and lesbians are persons who encounter the other (and thus themselves) in relation to persons of the same sex." Some people, therefore, are called to same-sex partnerships for their own sanctification. Opposite-sex partnerships wouldn’t work for them, because those would evade rather than establish the right kind of transformative vulnerability.

The difference between members of a same-sex couple is not "merely psychological," but also an embodied difference, if only because sexual response is nothing if not something done bodily. Difference cannot be reduced to male-female complementarity, because that would leave Jesus a deficient human being. Jesus did not need a female other half to be fully human. (This point raises the issue of what singleness is for, but that’s a question for another day.)

If this account is correct, then it turns out that conservatives wish to deprive same-sex couples not so much of satisfaction as of sanctification. But that is contradictory, because so far as I know no conservative has ever seriously argued that same-sex couples need sanctification any less than cross-sex couples do. It is at least contradictory to attempt in the name of holiness to deprive people of the means of their own sanctification,

Conservatives often claim it’s dangerous to practice homosexuality, because it might be a sin. I want to propose that the danger runs both ways. It is more than contradictory, it may even be resisting the Spirit, to attempt to deprive same-sex couples of the discipline of marriage and not to celebrate same-sex weddings. I don’t mean this kind of rhetoric to insult others or forestall discussion. I just mean that the danger of refusing to celebrate love is real.

And again Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying, "The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding feast to his son, and sent his servants to those who were invited to the marriage feast; but they would not come. Again he sent other servants, saying, "Tell those who are invited, Behold, I have made ready my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves are killed, and everything is ready; come to the marriage feast." But they made light of it and went off . . . Then he said to his servants, . . . "Go therefore to the thoroughfares, and invite to the marriage feast as many as you find. And . . . so the wedding hall was filled with guests. But when the king came in to look at the guests, he saw there a man who had no wedding garment; and he said to him, "Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?" And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, "Bind him hand and foot, and cast him into the outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth" (Matt. 22:1-13).

Not to celebrate same-sex weddings may also be morally dangerous.

CEOs and Corporate Greed

Ten years ago, even five years ago, the American market economy was the model for and the envy of the world. The marvelous flexibility of our economy, our belief that "change" is a good word, our constant striving for innovation were and are factors that make ours an economic system that can compete with -- and beat -- any other.

And yet, in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the Congress and the president created a law that was revolutionary in the changes it prescribed and the activities it proscribed in our capital markets. It ruled that officers, directors and auditors of publicly traded companies must tale new responsibility for the accuracy of the companies’ financial reports and face stiff penalties for failing to do so.

How could that have happened? I believe it happened because in the course of the 1990s, many American business leaders got confused and their moral compasses stopped working.

It is particularly sad that such confusion took place at a time when U.S. businesses were responding in a brilliant way to a very serious challenge. Globalization of the world economy became much more intense in the 1990s, and American companies lost pricing power. It is easy to see why a manufacturing firm in Chicago cannot increase prices if it has to compete with firms in Mexico, China, India and other countries with dramatically lower labor costs. But service firms discovered that they had the same problem. You cannot raise prices for, say, a call center in Naperville if you are competing with call centers in New Delhi. Only very local services, such as health care and legal services, have been immune from this globalization-driven loss of the ability to raise prices.

If you cannot raise prices, and if wage pressures are fairly intense because of the kind of tight labor market we had in the 1990s, the only way to fund the wage increases without reducing profits is to improve labor productivity.

U.S. businesses solved their problem of loss of pricing power but rising wages by investing in information technology to run their businesses more precisely. Investing in IT was just the beginning. The way of doing business also had to change.

Retail trade is an obvious example. In a modern store, you check out and each item’s bar code tells the clerk what it costs. More important, the same type of information system updates the inventory records and the order book when the inventory hits a level indicating that it is time to reorder. In contrast to an earlier era, you do not need clerks to keep inventory records and you do not need large warehouses (because we copied the Japanese just-in-time delivery system previously used only in manufacturing). Also, there is a saving on the cost of financing now-reduced inventories. These and similar systems not only financed higher wages for workers, but increased profits substantially.

This was an effective response on the part of American business executives. They deserved credit for it. But it perhaps was a factor in their moral confusion. Pundits told them it was a new economic era, and the excitement went to their heads in a variety of ways.

Two things stand out: executive compensation and the drive for ever increasing and fully predictable quarterly profits.

In 1980, the average large-company chief executive officer made 40 times more than the average employee in his or her firm. Let’s assume that the multiple made sense because of the extra preparation, the risk-taking ability, and the leadership skills required of CEOs.

By 2000, the multiple of the average CEO’s pay over that of the average worker in the firm had risen, according to some studies, to 400 times. So in the course of 20 years, the multiple of CEO pay went up by a factor of ten. There is no economic theory, however farfetched, which can justify such an increase. In my view, it is also grotesquely immoral.

I should also note that I knew a lot of CEOs in 1980, and I can assure you that the CEOs of 2000 were not ten times better -- if any better at all.

Now let’s look at earnings performance. During the 1990s corporate America developed a habit of predicting quarterly earnings -- something accomplished by the people in the financial management of public companies guiding allegedly independent investment analysts to a consensus on how much the company would make in the next quarter. That morphed into a string of predictions of ever rising quarterly profits.

In this time of confusion, if a company achieved what it forecast, the CEO -- he or she making 400 times an employee’s income -- was truly a genius. If the forecast was missed by underperforming, the genius was regarded as a fool and his or her tenure was questioned by the pundits of the investment banking community and the financial press.

What was really going on in response to this self-created situation was that companies were cooking the books, with the help of outsiders such as lawyers, investment bankers, commercial bankers and, yes, accountants and auditors.

When the tech bubble broke in the second quarter of 2000 and the large market correction began, the half of American households invested in the stock market started to notice that their retirement plans and mutual funds were losing value. They were unhappy, but they were not sure whom to blame.

The ensuing scandals let them know whom to blame: corporate executives. Lest anybody think it was just Enron, WorldCom, HealthSouth and a few others, financial implosions were happening with sufficient rapidity to make the American citizenry very angry.

In a democracy, when voters get angry, they let their elected representatives know just how angry they are. Congress and the White House responded with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, passed by overwhelming majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives and signed by a president who called it the most important securities legislation since 1934.

Let us stop for a moment and ask ourselves why the Congress, the president and the American people did not decide that the scandals involved just a few bad apples in an otherwise healthy business community. The reason: the widespread executive greed and the cooking-the-books phenomenon. The people thought that the business leadership in general needed a sharp lesson.

My impression is that many business executives think this is a bad dream that will soon go away. They are wrong. The American people are still angry and the politicians know it, I am told by friends on the Hill that their mail runs very heavy indeed from constituents strongly protesting the continuing excesses of executive compensation.

What should we be doing? We need enough CEOs and their boards -- preferably those of the very strongest companies -- who will inform the world that they wish to be judged on performance over time, not just yesterday or tomorrow. Lots of people will argue that it will be impossible to judge performance over time -- and it may take a while before the markets will adjust to a new, more rational management approach -- but we must take the risk and move in that direction. Private business leaders will have to show the courage to do it.

Is there some compass that should guide us? I think there is. My friend Kofi Annan in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize pointed out that at the center of all of the great religions is each person’s responsibility for others. Such responsibility is at the very heart of the Torah. In Christianity, it is dramatized in the Gospel of Matthew when a Pharisee asks Jesus which is the greatest of the commandments. He answers that there are two: the first is that we should adore the Lord our God. The second, equal to the first, is that we must love our neighbors as ourselves.

Does a CEO making 400 or 500 times more than the average employee not consider fellow workers to be neighbors? When we think of the community around us, are not those less fortunate then we -- the homeless, the orphaned, the uneducated -- our neighbors? What, after all, is the biggest difference between a homeless person on a windy corner and you and me? My answer is that I was luckier. When I look at such a person I do not swell with pride, but think that "there but for the grace of God go I." That person is my neighbor.

If once a week, when we are at our place of worship, or just sitting and thinking, would we not be better people and better leaders if we examined ourselves this way? In the past week, has everything I have done been moral, as opposed to legal but just within the outer limits of the law? In the next week, will everything I do be morally sound? We do not need theologians to guide us. Simply knowing that we should love our neighbors as ourselves is sufficient guidance.

God’s Arms (Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15)

But even as I write this, it’s Paul’s daunting promise to the Romans that haunts me: "Suffering produces endurance," he assures the Romans and us, "and endurance produces character and character produces hope." Recently I stood in the pulpit of my church and looked over the top of a white, 32-inch-long casket at a young couple from my congregation. Their six-month-old son, who had been happy and healthy just days before, had died in his sleep. The unfathomable suffering of the family was shadowed by a church filled with mourners for whom the scene enacted their most dreaded fears.

So Paul’s promise haunts me. Will the suffering in my church’s sanctuary produce "endurance, character and hope"? Will the suffering of Iraqi mothers mourning their sons produce character? Will the suffering of American wives, husbands and children mourning soldier spouses and parents produce hope? Hemingway quipped that the "world breaks everyone" and that some grow strong in the broken places." Some do, and some don’t. How is it that suffering can produce character, endurance and hope?

I know from experience that hope rises strongest in those who do not suffer in isolation. We are created for life together. Joys are sweeter when we revel in them together; pain shared will more likely make our broken places strong. So I told that grieving family in my church that they would need each other in a way they never had before.

Leslie Weatherhead told about a difficult pastoral call he once made to a grieving family:

In one corner an old white-haired woman sitting in a low chair, her face half hidden by her hand. . . . Her other hand is on the shoulder of a younger woman, little more than a girl, who is sitting at her feet. There is a fire in the grate. . . . The younger had only been married three months, and then death stalked her. . . husband through pneumonia, and brought him down at last. It was the day after the funeral. Suddenly the younger woman turns almost ferociously on me. . . . "Where is God?" she demands. "I’ve prayed to Him. . . .Where is He? . . . You preached once on the ‘Everlasting Arms.’ Where are they?" . . . I drew my fingertips lightly down the older woman’s arm. "They are here," I said. "They are round you even now. These are the arms of God."

When we suffer together, God becomes present to us in the arm of the other resting upon our shoulders. As a pastor, I know that Paul’s promised "endurance, character and hope" will be more likely to grow in those whose suffering is shared.

But at the heart of our Christian faith is a more radical, even scandalous, trust that God -- in God’s self -- also suffers with us. The cross planted at the center of this faith is the high-water mark of suffering. It declares that God descends with us to the depths of life; "There is no pain that you can bear that I have not embraced; there is no darkness that can overtake you that I have not seen; there is no fear that might grip you that I have not known. I have passed through it, and when you pass through it, I am with you."

Some years ago, I was moving furniture with a good friend, a junior high school shop teacher named John. The furniture was coming out of the apartment of a widow who had just made a wrenching decision to move into a nursing home. The rest was going to the Salvation Army. Helen, our mutual friend, had slept surrounded by this veneered department store bedroom suite all her life. She had no children to leave it to, so she had given the old bedroom set to my young daughter. It was an unhappy moving day, emptying rooms full of memories into John’s truck.

Each trip from apartment to curb seemed to set the two of us thinking about deeper things. We were about to carry out the headboard of the old mahogany bedstead when John suddenly stopped, and, with a few carefully chosen words, spoke about the death of his infant child many years ago. I knew about it, but we had never spoken of it. He was silent for a moment. Then he set his end down and looked at me, nodded toward the heavens and said, "He’s been there, that’s all there is to say, God’s been there."

Which brings us home to the Trinity, the doctrine hammered out by the church centuries ago in order to understand God in a way faithful to scripture. The Trinity promises the presence of a vulnerable and suffering God, a Savior who is with us in our suffering and who, in solidarity, grows in us the "endurance, character and hope" Paul promised. First and last, the Trinity guards the very truth proclaimed by John the Evangelist and Paul the Apostle, our trust that Jesus is truly God and truly human, or to use the words of my friend John, the Trinity declares that our trust is in a God "who has been there."

Scandalous Behavior (Luke 7:36-8:3)

Each of the four Gospels tells about the woman who anoints Jesus while he is at table, and in each Gospel someone sharply rebukes her for her action. But Luke is unique: unlike the other three Gospels, the act of anointing as told in Luke does not portend Jesus’ death. Instead, hospitality and table fellowship are the recurrent themes, and they are a clue to the meaning of this parable. The woman in Luke enacts radical (and offensive) hospitality even as she crashes the party. She incarnates an extravagantly gracious (and scandalous) welcome as she washes Jesus’ feet with her tears, dries them with her hair, kisses them with her lips and finally anoints them with oil.

Luke identifies her as "a woman of the city" and "a sinner." These two comments, along with the sensuousness of her actions, have led to speculation that she was a prostitute. Such conjecture is not impossible, but it is only conjecture, even though it has encouraged the church’s historic conflation of this woman and Mary Magdalene, who is mentioned at the end of this Gospel reading ("from whom seven demons had gone out"). The identification of Mary Magdalene as a prostitute is also unwarranted.

There are three characters in the tale: Simon the Pharisee and host of the party, this unnamed woman who crashes Simon’s pleasant soirée, and Jesus, the guest. In reading the story, one first notices the contrast in the ways Jesus and Simon treat the woman. Simon is immediately judgmental; Jesus is gracious. There may indeed be a sermon here.

Yet Luke’s interest in hospitality, plus the parabolic riddle embedded in the story that Jesus tells Simon, suggests that we should look for another contrast: the startling difference in how Simon and the woman treat Jesus. Simon is the very caricature of respectable religiosity, a Pharisee who is doubtless good and honest, as well as curious and open-minded enough to invite Jesus to dinner. The woman is, well, a woman, and a "woman of the city" at that. She is "a sinner" in everybody’s estimation, finally even that of Jesus. And she’s forward, uninvited and outrageous, breaking all the rules about how women and men are to relate to each other in this time and place. Yet it is this woman, and not Simon the host, who offers Jesus the ironically appropriate hospitality. Simon is parsimonious and guarded. He does not know how to welcome Jesus into his home. In the end, Simon the rebuker is rebuked, while the rebuked woman is named the perfect hostess and is forgiven her sins even though she seems never to have confessed them, at least not in words.

I imagine Simon not as some stereotypical hypocrite, but as a man much like many religious seekers I have encountered. He is bright and curious and interested in religious ideas. (Why else invite a traveling rabbi to dinner?) I imagine him sitting at the table with Jesus, his arms crossed as he leans away from his half-finished dinner, inquiring eloquently about Jesus’ views on this or that intriguing spiritual question. I imagine him eager to engage Jesus as a conversation partner.

How pleasant, after all, to host this young rabbi of note who offers another interesting spiritual perspective in the wild diversity of first-century Judaism. Simon didn’t need Jesus as Messiah or Savior; he was just interested in what he’d say. Thus his hospitality, such as it is, is really all about Simon and Simon’s spiritual interests. Our society, indeed our churches and our seminaries, are populated with more than a few Simons, interested and interesting spiritual dilettantes for whom Jesus is mostly, well. interesting

The woman, in contrast, offers Jesus a hospitality that is all about Jesus. It is oriented toward him, not her. There is no theological dinner talk, only her act of utter, off-putting, self-yielding devotion. She needs Jesus not to round out her personal spirituality but so she can become whole, the human being she was created to be.

A few years ago I introduced a new element into the weddings at which I officiate. Several weeks before the ceremony I ask the couple to write each other love letters. Write privately, I tell them. Don’t show the letter to anyone, not even to each other. Just seal it in an envelope and give it to me. And then I ask them if I can select excerpts from their letters to read as a part of the wedding sermon. Invariably the letters are quite moving. When I read from them everybody in the family has a good wedding cry, and some break down and sob.

A couple of attractive and bright graduate students wrote a pair of especially unforgettable letters. When I read one of the letters, it was not just the family members who cried but also the cellist, a stranger hired for the occasion, and I, the pastor.

It was the groom’s letter that did it. He wrote about how his wife-to-be loved him. Not knowing that he was penning Lukan theology as well as declaring love, he said that his fiancée’s love was most amazing because she loved him as he was, imperfections, male foibles and all. That was amazing enough, he wrote, but even more wondrous was the fact that her unconditional love had this way of pulling him to grow to be more worthy of it.

Her love did this without ever implying that he wasn’t worthy of it. Her unquestioning love took him as he was, but somehow nudged him to be a better man without ever saying that there was anything wrong with him. Maybe that’s why the entire congregation -- including the couple, the family, the cellist and me -- were in tears.

Dismantling The Da Vinci Code

If you’ve not read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, you’re in a shrinking group. More than 7 million hardback copies of the novel are in print, and it has by the publisher’s count been translated into more than 40 languages. It has remained at or near the top of most bestseller lists since its appearance a year ago. The second in a planned trilogy, the novel builds on the characters introduced in Angels and Demons.

The plot involves a quest for the holy grail that begins with a bizarre murder in the Louvre, races through the streets of Paris and the surrounding countryside, and eventually moves to the streets and churches of England. It involves the work of two sleuths: Robert Langdon, a Harvard academic who holds a chair of symbology (the author’s neologism), and Sophie Neveu, a beautiful French cryptologist whose encrypted name means "venue of wisdom." Brown fills the book with such riddles.

In Leonardo Da Vinci’s paintings the two discover clues to the meaning of the grail. In the end, inevitably, they fall in love. Only then does the reader discover that the grail is not a chalice, as medieval legend has it, but a tomb holding the bones of Mary Magdalene. To make matters more interesting, the grail also represents the womb of Mary Magdalene, who according to the novel bore Jesus’ child and whose descendants live on in France today -- Sophie being one of them. For this reason, the mutual attraction between Langdon and Sophie not only creates sexual interest but also holds theological import.

Brown’s novel is a conspiracy tract set in a fictional frame. The conspiracy theory is built on an unorthodox account of Christian history advanced in the early 1980s by the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail. In that pseudo-scholarly publishing sensation, Michael Baigent and colleagues argued, on the basis of documents found in the Bibliothèque de Nationale but later exposed as a hoax, that the descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene were part of the Merovingian royal line of the early Middle Ages. The Roman church sought to expunge evidence of this hidden history and eliminate the descendants themselves for the sake of preserving church authority and exalting orthodoxy.

Resisting the power of the church and guarding the secret history of the grail over the years has been a secret society, the Priory of Sion, presided over by a committee of sénéchaux (grand masters). The society engages in a bizarre sex ritual Brown calls Hieros gamos (sacred marriage). Although the meaning of this act remains unclear, it apparently celebrates "the sacred feminine" and embodies the connection between the erotic and the holy expunged by Christianity. Freud would have been pleased to know all this.

The plot thickens through the violent machinations of an albino monk who works for Opus Dei, an actual Roman Catholic organization portrayed by Brown with lightly veiled contempt. A former "British royal historian" named Sir Leigh Teabing, who has devoted his life to finding the grail, also plays a large part in the story.

The book is, of course, fiction. Brown has made it clear, however, that he regards the book as a serious contribution to a revisionist history of early and medieval Christianity, a history that offers insights into the nature of real faith and the identity of the true church. Judging from the enthusiastic response, many readers take him at his word. They find the book fascinating not only because they consider it a good read but also because they discover in it an appealing, alternative reading of Christianity.

The book also presents the Roman Catholic Church as a devious institution marked by deception, violence and scandal. The plot plays on Christianity’s patriarchal excesses and its conflicted approach to sexuality. A few allusions along the way tie this history to the current scandal of priestly sexual abuse and its cover-up. In other words, the book has something for almost everyone unhappy with the church.

The novel also trades on the spiritual hunger prevalent in our day. Brown’s characters frequently excoriate the church for its various atrocities and omissions, and exalt what they see as a lost spiritual aesthetic. "It is the mystery and wonderment that serve our souls, not the Grail itself," we learn in the book’s waning pages.

Brown’s ambitions as a cultural commentator are not always convincing. Not every reader will warm to the suggestion voiced by one of the characters that we should embrace "orgasm as prayer" and that men’s sexual climax is "a moment of clarity during which God [can] be glimpsed." In another scene, the novel scolds men for resisting this liberated view of sex, as Langdon reminisces about a lecture he’d recently given to undergraduates: "The next time you find yourself with a woman, look in your heart and see if you can approach sex as a mystical, spiritual act. Challenge yourself to find the spark of divinity that man can only achieve through the sacred feminine." To which the narrator adds: "The women smiled knowingly, nodding." Brown clearly intends this as a compliment to women. But the casting of females as sexual partners whose primary role is to help men achieve enlightenment seems an ill-conceived way of honoring "the sacred feminine." Feminists will not be impressed.

Brown is surely onto something in mingling religion and the erotic, the mysterious and the pleasurable. Such a combination strikes a chord among those who have rarely heard ministers say much on the subject or who assume that Christianity is either opposed to sexual enjoyment or unequipped to deal with it. Brown woos readers who hunger for passion and meaning, enticing them with a vision that unites sexuality and spirituality. It’s certainly a package that sells.

In any case, many women -- and, according to Brown’s claim on his Web site, particularly nuns -- purport to find this novel profoundly meaningful. Readers have warmed to the author’s efforts to envision a religion more deeply committed to women’s experience and leadership than the one they have encountered in church. Mary Magdalene, he contends, was a leader in the early church -- a fact that the church quickly acted to suppress. The real story that Christianity has covered up is not about Jesus at all but about this woman and her (female) descendants. According to the novel, men rewrote the narrative to defend patriarchy and deny the truth of this matriarchal lineage. For many people, apparently, such claims are entirely plausible.

Brown’s defense of this "history" gives fresh meaning to the old cliche about "blind faith." In an interview on NBC’s Today Show, for example, when Matt Lauer asked Brown if he had based the novel on "things that actually occurred," the author answered: "Absolutely all of it. Obviously. . . Robert Langdon is fictional, but all of the art, architecture, secret rituals, secret societies, all of that is historical fact."

On the contrary. The novel relies on slipshod scholarship and mixes occasional fact with a large measure of fantasy. There are, of course, undisputed facts in the novel. Paris does have a Ritz Hotel. The Louvre does display Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. Westminster Abbey is in London. The quest for the grail -- the chalice used at the Last Supper -- was a consuming fascination in medieval culture. Opus Dei does exist, and the Vatican is located in the heart of Rome. Beyond such matters, almost everything Brown asserts or implies as fact is misleading or mistaken. Mostly the latter.

Some have applauded the book as creating a teaching moment about the contours of Christian history and theology, and thoughtful readers might well be intrigued by complex questions the novel raises about Christian origins. They may also be vexed by the evidence that points to the church’s patriarchal history. Most, however, will have neither the patience nor the knowledge to sort occasional fact from overwhelming fiction.

Among the many errors, confusions and misjudgments is the central claim that the Priory of Sion is of medieval origin, with a list of grand masters that includes Leonardo, his predecessor Botticelli, and the likes of Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo and even Claude Debussy. In actuality, this account of the priory first appeared in France in the late 1950s, complete with a fabricated history claiming links to the medieval Knights of the Temple. Brown explains the importance of this connection: "Knights who claimed to be ‘searching for the chalice’ were speaking in code as a way to protect themselves from a Church that had subjugated women, banished the Goddess, burned nonbelievers, and forbidden the pagan reverence for the sacred feminine." Some of these indictments of the church arise from the legacy of medieval patriarchy. But by feminizing the Templars, Brown turns the plot into a sentimental fantasy. Perhaps he has read too much Sir Walter Scott or fallen under the spell of Camelot.

When Brown refers to heinous facts of church history, he either gets them wrong or magnifies them out of proportion. An example of the latter is his assertion that the church burned 5 million women at the stake during the witch-hunts of the later Middle Ages. If the historical record included only one such murder, it would be too many, but the figure Brown offers would have depopulated Europe altogether during this period. Historians with no interest in protecting Christianity have set the number far lower -- between 30,000 and 50,000. Miscalculating by a factor of 100 is understandable to make a point, perhaps, but not when such information is passed along as factual.

A greater muddle is Brown’s attempt to narrate Christian origins. He contends that the emperor Constantine is responsible for much theological mischief. For the first three centuries, he asserts, Christians viewed Jesus "as a mortal prophet, a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless." This would have surprised the apostle Paul and most of the theologians whose works defined Christian orthodoxy before the council at Nicea in 325 CE. All shared a belief in Jesus’ divinity, even if they sometimes described it differently.

Brown insists it was Constantine who "upgraded Jesus’ status" by concocting the notion of his divinity -- for political reasons. "Many scholars," Brown insists through the voice of one of his characters, "claim that the early Church literally stole Jesus from His original followers, hijacking His human message, shrouding it in an impenetrable cloak of divinity, and using it to expand their own power." Who were these early followers interested only in Jesus the man, the great prophet, the human teacher? Brown does not say, and the historical evidence for the claim is nonexistent.

One of the book’s more ridiculous assertions is that the so-called Sangreal documents, held by the Priory of Sion, include "the legendary ‘Q’ Document," which "even the Vatican admits . . . exists." A document collecting sayings by Jesus, referred to by biblical scholars by this name, has long been posited as a source for the Gospel writers. But the possible existence of such a document does not justify Brown’s excited tone.

In the category of the bizarre is Brown’s claim that "any gospels that described the earthly aspects of Jesus’ life had to be omitted from the Bible." What aspects would these be -- his teaching, his acts of compassion toward the sick, his care for his followers? One can only conclude that Brown has not bothered to read Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, since these canonical Gospels are persistently and profoundly interested in earthly details.

One of the book’s embarrassing confusions is the notion that the Gnostic Gospels were excluded from the canon because they "speak of Christ’s ministry in very human terms." In fact, such texts, most of which date no earlier than the late second century, favor an extreme dualism between spirit and body and offer little consolation for those hoping to celebrate the sexual passions that are so much on Brown’s mind. They are largely collections of secret sayings, many bearing references that will strike modern readers as surreal at best.

The noncanonical Gospel of Philip is an example. It does contain a passage -- much discussed by scholars -- describing Mary Magdalene as the one whom Jesus loved "more than the disciples," so much so that he used to "kiss her [often]," to the dismay of the men. To read this as a veiled reference to marriage is as flimsy as claiming that Judas’s kiss was really about something other than betrayal.

Further, if this gospel needs to be recovered as authoritative, as Brown insists, then what about its assertion, a few passages later, that "God is a man-eater, and for this reason people are [sacrificed] to him"? Or that "the world is a corpse-eater" and "truth is a life-eater"? Brown seems unaware that the duality of Gnostic cosmology portrays the "flesh" and its appetites consistently in derogatory tones. So much for sacred sex.

In the category of the absurd is Brown’s assertion that references to the marriage of Mary Magdalene and Jesus "kept recurring in the gospels." Exactly which gospels he is referring to remains unclear. When he goes on to claim this as "a matter of historical record" and to contend that "[Leonardo] Da Vinci was certainly aware of that fact," one can only wonder what "record" he is referring to. It is unlikely that mention of any such marriage would be found in Gnostic sources, since these generally despise sex because it requires the use of the body.

And what of Brown’s claim that Leonardo’s "Last Supper practically shouts at the viewer that Jesus and Magdalene were a pair"? Brown insists that the effeminate figure at Jesus’ right hand in this scene is Mary Magdalene, not, as tradition has it, "the beloved disciple." To make such a claim he conveniently ignores the iconographical conventions of the day, which directed that the male disciple described in John’s Gospel as the one whom "Jesus loved" be depicted in just such a manner. The late Renaissance was interested in the affection between older and younger men, not in a heterosexual liaison between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

Art historians with nothing to win or lose from assessing Brown’s elaborate theories about the "code" in Leonardo’s paintings have largely dismissed his specific claims as well as his overarching theory. Ironically, while Brown celebrates Leonardo’s creativity, he views art primarily as a useful way of concealing information. In Brown’s hands, Leonardo disappears as a masterly artist and becomes little more than a technician inserting esoteric secrets on his canvases. One can already imagine crowds of American tourists lining up this summer, novel in hand, to scrutinize the paintings cited in Browns book. So much for art.

Among the ridiculous claims Brown forwards is that "the Church" -- by which he means the "sinister" forces of Opus Dei and the Vatican -- is bent on destroying the "Sangreal documents" by any means, including violence, because they allegedly reveal the secret truths about Jesus’ marriage to Mary Magdalene and disclose the grail’s true identity. All this is to be explained, according to Brown’s fiction and those who earlier advanced the conspiracy theory, because such documents if ever released would destroy the church’s credibility.

All of this is to say that The Da Vinci Code is based on manifestly bad history and driven by ideological passions. As a novel it also invites readers to an indulgence: it offers a taste of adventure, a glance at art history and a sip of "sacred sexuality" in the form of spirituality lite.

Chesterton once suggested that the saint needed by each culture is the one who contradicts it the most. Brown’s Magdalene and Jesus fail us on this point. His religion of the grail requires no discipline of thought, no virtue in act and little in the category of spiritual commitment.

By contrast, the old-fashioned Jesus of the canonical Gospels stands with the ancient prophets to condemn the misuse of power, the failing of community and the pretension of religion. He calls us to a costly love for the sake of the vulnerable, the oppressed and the marginalized. He summons us to the worship not of a womb or even of a tomb but of the God of justice who exposes the idolatrous worship of nation and power. About such real conspiracies against the faith, Brown remains silent.