Articles – Page 29 – Religion Online

Going Creedless

Book Reviews:

Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. By Elaine Pagels. Random House, 241 pp.

Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew. By Bart D. Ehrman. Oxford University Press, 294 pp.

Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament. By Bart D. Ehrman. Oxford University Press, 342 pp.

The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle. By Karen L. King. Polebridge Press, 230 pp.

Elaine Pagels begins Beyond Belief by recounting how, on a chilly February morning in Manhattan, she stepped into a church again after many years of absence. The truths of Nicene Christianity had not suddenly won her over. Rather, she was there because she had lain awake the night before, grief-stricken at the prospect of losing her two-and-a-half-year-old son, who had just been diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension. As she heard the liturgy intoned, she thought, "Here is a family that knows how to face death." In the following months, she found friendship and solace in the church as she and her husband confronted their son’s death. In the following months, she found friendship and solace in the church she and her husband confronted their son’s death.

A quest for personal truth brought Pagels part way back into the church, but it also kept her part way out. Like many Americans, she had wandered away from the church’s creeds and confessions only to have its rituals and community draw her back. More than seekers but less than adherents, such people are not capable of a simple childhood faith. Something about Jesus’ way of life rather than doctrine carries them along. Prayers and hymns, not authoritative teachings, nourish them. Pagels is convinced that Christianity went wrong when it "became virtually synonymous with accepting a certain set of beliefs." What people are seeking, she says, is a personal experience of divine power.

Pagels is interested in early Christian writings that never made it into the canon, like the Gospel of Thomas. She finds in that text a Christianity that seems to affirm the personal search for truth and the experience of the divine. In recent years, Thomas and other alternative scriptures (and books about them) have captured the public imagination and the interest of members of mainline churches.

Bart Ehrman and Karen King share Pagels’s interests in noncanonical writings (all three admire each other’s work, as evident from dust-jacket blurbs). All believe that knowing the rich diversity of the early church can save us from the notion that only the orthodox got things right. The three teach at prestigious universities (Pagels at Princeton, Ehrman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, King at Harvard Divinity School) and enjoy the respect of the academic guild. They have also won a popular following, and each has been regularly featured in the media (all three appeared in a December 2003 Time magazine cover story about "The Lost Gospels"). All three owe their success in part to their ability to communicate historical complexities to a lay audience. Pagels’s and Ehrman’s books in particular are page-turners in which early Christian history unfolds with the drama of a first-rate detective story.

But something more is going on here. These scholars also represent the spirit of 21st-century America, with its love of diversity, its suspicion of traditional authority and its respect for personal experience. Their work is not to be confused with the fictionalized conspiracy theories of Dan Brown’s best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code, but their popular success is not unrelated to his. Historian Philip Jenkins in Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way has gone so far as to assert that the alternative gospels tell us less about the beginnings of Christianity than about "the interest groups who seek to use them today; about the mass media, and how religion is packaged as popular culture; and . . . more generally, about the changing directions of contemporary American religion."

Pagels and Ehrman tell a similar story: Under the threat of persecution, certain church leaders, especially Irenaeus, became convinced that Christianity could survive only if it became more unified in doctrine and structure. When Constantine came to power, the state promoted the church’s unity for the sake of its own. The "orthodox" established a canon of writings, which had to be rightly interpreted by authoritative confessions and teachers. Christianity became a matter of right belief, rather than a vital search for divine truth.

Pagels and Ehrman write sympathetically as well as critically about these developments. Irenaeus was not the Grand Inquisitor of the second century. He did not worry about heresy in order to protect his own power or prestige. Rather, he was deeply concerned that the appeals of the "heretics" to personal experience (including visions and new revelations) inevitably divided and weakened the church. Personal claims to truth needed to be tested against the truth that the church had received in the canonical Gospels’ witness to Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. Right belief would ensure unity, and unity would ensure strength.

In addition, Ehrman notes that only orthodoxy had the ingredients that would allow Christianity to become a great world religion. The major alternative movements -- the Ebionites, Marcionites and Gnostics -- had historical liabilities. The Ebionites made demands for Jewish ritual purity that would have repelled gentiles. Marcionism’s rejection of Judaism made the faith look like a historical novelty, with no roots in antiquity and hence no clear claim to abiding significance. The various forms of Gnosticism promoted a spiritual elitism that would have had difficulty winning the masses. Historical factors thus conspired to ensure that orthodoxy alone would prevail and profoundly shape Western civilization.

Yet all three also believe that orthodoxy’s triumph, however inevitable, was also tragic, since it came at the cost of repressing Christianity’s origins. Orthodoxy began to think of itself as divinely ordained, rather than as part of a larger historical conversation about the meaning of Jesus. To Pagels and company, the discovery of the ancient texts in the Nag Hammadi library in 1945 has had the salutary effect of forcing Christianity to reconsider its past. The heretics can now speak for themselves, rather than be seen only through the lenses of the orthodox writers.

Pagels, Ehrman and King suggest three ways in which the alternative scriptures can benefit Christians today. First, the diversity of early Christianity gives us greater insight into the development of the church. By better understanding orthodoxy’s opponents, we more clearly see what was at stake in its attacks on "heresy." Would gentile Christians have to keep the Jewish law? Was the Father of Jesus Christ a different God from the Creator of the universe and the God of Israel? Were the body and the material world a prison, a place of temptation and trial? Was Jesus a God-human whose death on the cross mysteriously won redemption for humankind, or a great human teacher so intensely in touch with the divine that he could offer others a liberating but esoteric wisdom? These were the central questions under debate.

Second, the diversity of early Christianity reminds us that orthodoxy was never the only Christian response to Jesus’ life and message. Ebionites, Marcionites and various kinds of Gnostics also thought of themselves as faithful followers of the man from Galilee. Pagels and Ehrman take note of points at which orthodoxy shared the theology of the heretics even as it rejected that theology. Moreover, some heretical emphases may have helped shape orthodoxy. The church had to respond to the Ebionite concern to honor Israel, as well as to the Marcionite insistence that Christianity was something truly new in history. Gnosticism’s contribution lay in directing orthodoxy to value continuing spiritual experience. King goes even further. The noncanonical Gospel of Mary, she believes, points to an early Christian concern for gender equality and nonhierarchical relationships, a concern that the church desperately needs to recover today.

Finally, the diversity of early Christianity teaches us to honor the variety of contemporary Christianities. We do not always have to pick one way as right (although King says we must do so on the issue of human equality); we can learn from each. Pagels suggests that orthodoxy and Gnosticism represent not opposites but two rungs on a ladder. The orthodoxy built on the Gospel of John calls us to believe the basic story about Jesus and his significance to the early church; the Gnostics invite us to a second conversion, a faith seeking understanding that transforms the self. As Pagels eloquently states, all of us have to take responsibility for our own spiritual journeys. We must draw insight from any source that helps us to live more fully in relationship to the divine and to each other.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the German theologian and social philosopher Ernst Troeltsch argued that a desire for personal religious experience has been a revitalizing force in religion in every era. He might view today’s popular interest in alternative scriptures and Christianities as sociologically inevitable and ecclesiologically essential, Pagels, Ehrman and King have lifted up a mystical impulse in early Christianity that attracts people. If churches are to find their way into the future, they should not reject this popular spirituality but seek to understand it and speak to it.

The three authors take a descriptive claim -- early Christianity contained a variety of forms -- and make it prescription: there should be a variety of Christianities. While the historical questions surrounding their approach are complex, I suggest that members of orthodox churches should hesitate about following it, even as they learn from Pagels and company. Several issues are central.

One of the issues is eschatology. How do we know the presence of God under the conditions of this world? To what degree can we experience God’s glory, power and wisdom here and now? The Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary both contain a strong dose of realized eschatology. The kingdom of God is not a historical horizon but an inner, existential reality. "What such people seek," writes Pagels, ". . . [are] insights or intimations of the divine that validate themselves in experience -- what we might call hints and glimpses offered by the luminous epinoia."

Nicene Christianity, however, has insisted that realized eschatology is inevitably tempted to become, in Luther’s words, a theology of glory rather than a theology of the cross. Our claim that we experience God here and now must continually be corrected by a faithful longing for the kingdom that is yet to come and that will come by God’s grace alone. We see now, but only through a glass darkly.

These writings also raise issues of ecclesiology. Thomas and Mary, as read by Pagels and King, encourage a personal search for truth. Each of us can receive revelation immediately and directly. Each of us can be an authoritative teacher, guided by the divine Spirit.

Nicene Christianity, in contrast, has insisted that the search for truth is a profoundly communal enterprise, in which each person remains a lifelong pupil of the Holy Spirit. Truth is found not in special moments of personal ecstasy but in daily patterns of life together. As a community of faith gathers to read, hear and study sacred texts, as it sings hymns of praise and confesses its sins, and as it practices acts of hospitality, compassion and justice, it learns and relearns how to receive and embody God’s truth. Such truth always comes mediated through texts, traditions and communal practices and therefore as incomplete and fragile, calling us to listen again with each other’s help for a divine Word.

The gospels of Thomas and Mary challenge us to reflect on what it means for a text to be scripture. The question is not simply what belongs to the canon. Rather, what does it mean for a community to listen to a sacred text? Pagels and King see texts first of all as sources of special information. Scriptures teach us what Jesus said or what the early church said about Jesus. Moreover, different scriptures teach us different kinds of truth. In Pagels’s and King’s scheme, the gospels of Thomas and Mary point us to the hidden truth about our inner, spiritual lives, whereas the canonical Gospels rehearse external facts that orthodoxy asks us to believe about Jesus as the unique God-human.

But Nicene Christianity has regarded sacred texts less as repositories of information than as living witnesses to the divine truth who is Jesus, the crucified One now risen. The texts have a sacramental character. They point beyond themselves. They open our eyes to a kingdom that is hidden from our sight, yet already near at hand. They call us to trust in the promises of God as offered in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The purpose of a sacred text is not to show us the way to the true self within. Rather, scripture asks us to listen beyond ourselves to the One who is the Way.

Finally, what does it mean to confess the faith? In Pagels’s and King’s reading of alternative scriptures, faith is primarily a way of life with God, not a set of words about God. It is discipleship, not theology. But Nicene Christianity has insisted that the two are inseparable. How we confess the faith inevitably shapes how we live it. Truth is for the sake of goodness; theology, for the sake of piety.

Pagels and King are right to remind us that the church’s confessions of faith have always been human products, riddled with political intrigue and too often employed for political ends. But the history of the composition and reception of confessions also teaches us that the church has found life-giving orientation in them. At its best, confession is a way of telling the story that bears a pilgrim people from past to present to future. Humans live by words -- and the words of the great confessions help us rightly to read the scriptures as words of promise, not empty belief. As Karl Barth wrote, the point of confessing the faith is above all to give God the glory.

Pagels, Ehrman and King consistently define orthodoxy in terms of right belief that stands in opposition to "the trust that enables us to commit ourselves to what we hope and love," But Nicene Christianity has also understood orthodoxy in a richer and deeper sense: as right praise. To be orthodox is to strive to stand rightly with others before the mystery of the true God. To be orthodox is to join with a community of faith in adoration of God’s dora (glory), which already casts light on the day when God will finally make everything right. Belief is never correct when it becomes nothing more than a political mechanism to ensure the unity of an institution. Belief is right only when it points us in the right direction: to glorification of the true God, who promises not to give us a secret wisdom, but to be graciously present to us, even and especially where our vision and knowledge are weak.

Is my depiction of Nicene Christianity nothing more than a personal fantasy or an appeal to a long-forgotten communal memory? Many contemporary churches couldn’t care less about their Nicene heritage. Liberals and conservatives alike ignore the Nicene Creed and replace it with their own lists of right belief or right practice. If Pagels and company caricature orthodoxy, perhaps it is because orthodoxy has already done such a good job of caricaturing itself.

Nevertheless, Nicene Christianity over the centuries has not ignored the insights that the three scholars try to mine from alternative scriptures. On the contrary, Nicene Christianity has again and again explored these very questions of the right relationship between belief and trust, personal integrity and communal commitment, canonical scripture and other sources of spiritual insight. We do not need alternative Christianities. Our challenge is to rediscover the richness, complexity and vital witness of our orthodox heritage. We need to attend again to our own scriptures and confessions, our own worship and ethics, so that we might rightly praise the Triune God.

Sacred Spaces

Book Reviews:

When Church Became Theatre: The Transformation of Evangelical Church Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America. By Jeanne Halgren Kilde. Oxford University Press, 310 pp., $45.00.

Ugly as Sin: Why They Changed Our Churches from Sacred Places to Meeting Spaces -- and How We Can Change Them Back Again. By Michael S. Rose. Sophia Institute Press, 239 pp., $24.95.

Building from Belief: Advance, Retreat, and Compromise in the Remaking of Catholic Church Architecture. By Michael E. DeSanctis. Liturgical Press, 115 pp., $19.95.

From Meetinghouse to Megachurch: A Material and Cultural History. By Anne C. Loveland and Otis B. Wheeler University of Missouri Press, 336 pp., $59.95.

American church architecture is wonderfully varied. It includes rickety storefront assembly halls and megachurch complexes, diminutive country churches and massive Gothic piles. Our ideas about worship space come from our different religious traditions, our social enclaves, our sense of history (or lack of it), and our personal worship experiences and desires.

Despite this variety, most American Christians visualize "church" in more or the less the same way: as a rectangular building with a tower or spire, containing a rectangular sanctuary with pews in straight lines facing an elevated pulpit and choir loft. For two centuries most American churches have taken this form. Several architectural styles have dominated the landscape. Colonial revival buildings (white clapboard or red brick, with white pillars in front) are perennially popular. The Gothic style, despite its Roman Catholic overtones, has also been fashionable among Protestants since the mid-19th century. Gothic churches generally have spires or crenellated towers, pointed arches, buttresses, and rectangular or cruciform sanctuaries with vaulted ceilings.

In the late 19th century, Protestant congregations popularized the "auditorium church." In her engaging book on this period, Jeanne Halgren Kilde of Macalaster College explores the development of the auditorium church, showing how the style grew out of urban congregations’ desire for heartfelt, accessible and participatory worship. These buildings were often Romanesque -- rambling, rough stone structures with multiple towers and round-topped arches. Inside they incorporated the lessons of theater design. Sanctuaries were radial-plan amphitheaters with large stages, highly visible organs and choir lofts, dramatic lighting, comfortable seats and harmonious and colorful decor. Recognizing a need for family ministry and urban outreach, architects integrated parlors, lecture halls, sports facilities, locker rooms and classrooms into the church complex. Examples of this style include Pilgrim Congregational Church in Cleveland (1894) and Trinity Methodist Episcopal in Denver (1888).

The auditorium church and its associated style of worship faded in popularity after World War I. Many Protestants desired a return to a more formal service, and liturgical formality called for architectural formality. Churches erected at this time, often in the Gothic style, have large, formal, high-ceiling sanctuaries that focus the congregation’s attention on the liturgical center of worship rather than on fellow worshipers.

By the mid-20th century, another trend emerged. Traditional, formal church buildings seemed stale and inappropriate to many. Next to modern public buildings, "old-fashioned" churches appeared hopelessly obsolete. Dissatisfaction with older forms stemmed also from a new understanding of worship and community. The new liturgical ideal, based on early Christian precedent, was the "gathered church," a body of believers that comes together for fellowship and participatory worship. Architects and building committees responded accordingly.

Architectural reform in this period was guided by denominational committees, satellite departments of the National Council of Churches and architects’ associations. Big, drafty sanctuaries, they argued, could not foster the desired sense of community. Their model church was a small one, with a horizontal emphasis, accommodating no more than a few hundred in a circular worship space that encouraged a sense of belonging.

The modern style seemed to offer considerable advantages. Innovative geometry and plain surfaces would challenge complacency. Industrial materials made structures cheaper. Smaller spaces would draw congregations together. The "honest" use of natural materials added warmth to otherwise stark surfaces.

There are excellent examples of churches from this era, such as the buildings of Eliel and Eero Saarinen in Columbus, Indiana (Tabernacle Church of Christ, 1942; North Christian, 1964), a city known for its splendidly effective embrace of modern architecture.

But most attempts at modern church buildings were less successful. Modernism presented both conceptual and practical challenges for congregations and architects. For instance, academic modernism celebrates individual experience, yet churches are supposed to promote community. Proclaiming "form follows function," modernism heralded the death of ornament, yet ornament in many Christian traditions is essential to worship and group identity. Cool modern design also demands more mental work from worshipers, who are often unprepared for the task.

To make matters worse, middle-brow building committees and architects rarely adopted modernism as a coherent design scheme. Modern churches may temporarily have looked "up-to-date," but in the end they proved failures. I know of several churches commonly referred to (by church members!) as "the ugliest church in Christendom," and they are all modern, It may be possible to play with Gothic or neoclassical details and still produce a building with character. Modernism, perhaps like any plain style, is harder to get right. The bad buildings look really bad; they are bland, uninspired spaces without clear focal points.

Indeed. A common complaint about the past 50 years of church architecture is that it is remarkably unattractive – "ugly as sin," to cite the title of Michael S. Rose’s book. Rose is a Roman Catholic and his book is directed at other Catholics, but the lament is not unfamiliar to Protestants.

Why have we trampled on centuries of magnificent church architecture, Rose asks, and replaced it with cement boxes devoid of meaningful architectural or decorative elements? A sense of the sacred, he argues, is missing from modern buildings that owe too much to secular influences. He calls for a return to historical forms and styles (he prefers medieval or Renaissance) and encourages congregations to design new structures or undo modern renovations. The aim should be to recapture the essential elements of church architecture: verticality, iconography, permanence, hierarchy and formality.

As an example of what must be done, Rose cites Rolf Rohn’s 1996 restoration of the Cathedral of St. Paul in Worcester, Massachusetts. The restoration included repainting the Gothic interior in its original multicolor scheme, removing the carpet, and adding an elaborate hand-carved raredos where a simple blank concrete wall had replaced the original in 1968.

More than any other group of American Christians, Catholics are engaged in a lively discussion about the nature and form of church architecture. The disgruntled express general dissatisfaction with reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), particularly those that led to an abandonment of Catholic distinctiveness and tradition.

For both Catholics and Protestants, architectural ideals have often been stated as vague principles rather than definitive guidelines. The sentiments expressed by Vatican II are typical: buildings should have "dignity and beauty" and a "true sense of proportion" and be "an expression of our times." These principles are nearly identical to what the Reformers espoused 500 years ago, and they’ve been repeated many times since. When working in an entirely new architectural idiom such as modernism however, such murky instructions may be unhelpful. For instance, how do you achieve "dignity and beauty" with bare cement walls? Is proportion something universal, and if so how is it measured? The problems and possibilities of modern church architecture are sensibly addressed by another Catholic writer, Michael E. DeSanctis, a professor of fine arts at Gannon University. Modernism, he concedes, appeared to threaten a rich tradition, robbing congregations of a shared and easily understood aesthetic and ripping out the sensual aspects of worship. This is not a necessary outcome, he argues, and many good things did and still can come out of liturgical and architectural reforms.

Authenticity, he believes, is an important goal for architecture and worship. For authentic experience to take place, Christians must acknowledge the modern aspects of their lives and not retreat to historical styles out of nostalgia for a more pious past. Great architecture has always been "modern," both responding to and challenging the cultures that produce it.

DeSanctis promotes the Catholic Church’s notion of a "noble simplicity" (Vatican II) in architecture, design that fosters "a real appreciation for the workings of ritual action, for symbol, poetry and art -- those things which nourish the soul, keep the heart supple, and point us beyond ourselves." He insists that church architecture can and should counteract the pervasive informality and self-absorption of contemporary life. Contemporary design can force us to think freshly and deliberately about beauty, holiness and the act of worship.

The architecture of 63 megachurch complexes is thoroughly explored by Anne Loveland and Otis Wheeler, professors at Louisiana State University. They show that the architectural roots of the megachurch lie in the multipurpose meetinghouses of Protestant dissenters in colonial America, in the vast but impermanent structures and tabernacles of revivalists, and, significantly, in the expensive auditorium church complexes of the late 19th century.

Loveland and Wheeler also point out that the megachurches reveal the unmistakable influence of modern commercial designs of office parks and shopping malls. With some notable exceptions, such as Robert Schuller’s pioneering Crystal Cathedral, designed by Philip Johnson (1980), the exterior architecture of the megachurch is nondescript. Buildings may nod in the direction of historical style (adding a pillared portico or an oddly small white spire) or symbolic reference (resembling, for instance, a gigantic tent), but in general the megachurches look like office complexes. That is largely intentional. The aim is to make a comfortable space for people who do not feel comfortable in traditional churches.

These are not buildings that criticize the visual aspects of modern culture. In design, and in the multimedia spectacles that take place inside, the megachurch embraces the casual, commercial, comfortable and entertaining multimedia world. In 1996 the pastor of Faith Community Church in West Covina, California, told the Los Angeles Times: "What we were aiming for was the feeling of a mall. A place that’s familiar, a real gregarious place." Hence the snack bars, polished stone lobbies, large clear windows and central information kiosks found in many of these complexes.

Megachurch worship spaces are essentially theaters, with comfortable seats fanned out before a large stage flanked by huge video screens. Ornamentation (stained glass, crosses, engraved mottoes) tends to be spare. These churches can be beautifully constructed of the best materials at great expense. (Megachurch members are financially generous, far in excess of the national per capita giving average.) Their builders know the emotional value of warm, sunny, public spaces. Megachurches are welcoming, and despite their gargantuan proportions, they invite a sense of institutional belonging. These churches are trying to reach as many people as possible and keep their audiences engaged. From a purely practical point of view, they appear to do the job.

These days, most of the buildings we inhabit -- our houses, our schools, our shopping malls -- do nothing to elevate the soul. Most Christians would agree that church buildings, by contrast, should affect us spiritually. Worship space should make us aware of our senses, remove us from the ordinary experiences of life, and prepare us for worship and fellowship. One of Rose’s major objections to modern churches is that worshipers don’t know what to do in them. He insists that this is because the architecture itself offers no clues as to how to act or feel. To him, a modern building is a blank space that confuses, rather than settles, the worshiper. Hence his argument for verticality, iconography, permanence, hierarchy and formality.

Rose’s principles cannot all be applied consistently across denominations and congregations, of course. Churches will differ, for instance, about iconographic representation and hierarchy within the sanctuary. On the other hand, some verticality, a feeling of tradition and permanence, and at least a degree of formality do seem characteristics of most effective church spaces. These characteristics require both good design and its effective realization through high-quality materials and workmanship.

Yet somewhere in the building process issues of design need to be considered, because design does matter. Human beings have long recognized that architecture shapes behavior and experience. We live in a material world and respond to what we see and feel, often quite unconsciously Thoughtful church architects ask congregations what they want the church to do spiritually as well as functionally.

One of my favorite new church designs is West Presbyterian Church in Wilmington, Delaware. In 1993 the congregation’s 1870s Gothic building was nearly destroyed by fire. Working with the Philadelphia architect George Yu, the congregation chose to salvage what it could of its old building, which was important to its inner-city neighborhood. Yu incorporated "symbols of memory into the new church, including an original three-door entrance, brick buttresses along one exterior wall, the original marble font, and some pieces of stained glass from the Gothic building. He engaged the congregation in discussions about the Reformed tradition of worship and architecture and the liturgical goals for the new space.

The new sanctuary is a high-ceilinged, light-filled, warm and inviting space with movable seating for about 100. High-quality natural materials in neutral tones predominate. The rest of the church complex is pleasant and well organized, but the chief energy clearly went into designing a worshipful and meaningful sanctuary. West Presbyterian is not a magnificent, eye-catching building -- in fact, it is a little quirky -- but it is eminently well suited for its congregation and its neighborhood.

Although congregations build churches to suit their worship and ministry needs, churches exist also in a wider context of neighborhoods and cities. Even the most nondescript little church structure marks its space as set apart for something sacred, and that gets noticed. In what congregations build and where they build it, they say something about their relationship to the surrounding culture. They also demonstrate what is important in their rituals and beliefs. Intentionally or not, buildings communicate what really matters to their builders.

With the advantage of hindsight, historians may have the edge in deciphering these messages. According to Kilde, the auditorium 3 churches of the 19th century were not designed as isolated retreats. The congregations intended to have a public role that extended well beyond the boundaries of their buildings. The architecture itself, Kilde argues, "trumpeted the new public role of evangelical religion" as a source of order and stability that would reach out to and protect the larger community. A compelling aspect of Kilde’s book is her reading of the buildings themselves in order to understand the religious culture that produced them: bold, confident, masculine and modern -- yet slightly on the defensive.

We are perhaps too close to the architecture of our era to decipher its meanings so completely. Nonetheless, we should be aware of the messages our churches communicate about the place of religion in our lives and in our communities. Consider the megachurch. How honest are buildings that rely on sophisticated sound systems to mask dismal acoustics? Can a church built in the idiom of a secular consumer society effectively counter that culture’s influences? These books lead us to ask such questions and encourage us to seek the answers.

Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God? Part Four

(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, head 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. S. Wesley Ariarajah’s article is the fourth in a series.)

In Asian traditions a question can be answered in four ways: "yes"; "no"; "I don’t know"; and silence. "I don’t know" (or "maybe") means that the issue is complex and that one needs to nuance the answer from a variety of perspectives. It also indicates that one needs to explore the subject rather than be rushed into giving a yes or no answer -- which unfortunately is becoming an obsession among some groups of Christians.

Even though some questions can indeed, and perhaps should, be answered with a clear yes or no, in the field of ethics one comes across gray areas where clear-cut answers are less than helpful. What is right -- pacifism or just war theory? Pro-life or pro-choice? We need to talk about such issues at some length. A simple yes or no does violence to the issue.

Then there is silence. Silence is used when the disciple needs to reflect further on the question itself. Not all questions are validly formulated; not all of them help deeper exploration of the issue; not all of them arise out of genuine concern to know. The guru’s silence sends the disciple back for further reflection. At other times the guru maintains silence because the question is on a matter beyond verbal response or intellectual exploration. The only assistance the teacher can give is to enable the disciple to have the experience necessary to know the answer for him- or herself.

The question "Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?" raises the possibility of a fifth kind of answer: yes and no.

The Jewish writer Chaim Potok powerfully lifts up the issues involved here in a story about a young rabbi traveling in Japan. At a Buddhist shrine the rabbi saw an old Japanese man deep in prayer. The young rabbi asked his Jewish companion, "Do you think our God is listening to him?"

"I don’t know . . . I never thought about it."

"Neither did I until now. If he [God] is not listening, why not?"

"If he is listening, then -- well, what are we all about?"

The question of whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God is not only a question about Muslims but one about all peoples of whatever religious tradition who raise their hearts and hands in prayer to the Divine Other. Is God listening to their prayers? If not, why not?

This has little to do with Abraham or Abrahamic faiths (as George Bush’s theology of political necessity would have it) but with the deeper issues of what it means to affirm the oneness of God and what consequences we draw from it for our attitudes and actions.

The Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions insist that there is one God and that God is the creator, provider and protector of all. "The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world and those who live in it," says the Psalmist (Ps. 24:1). The inspiration for this belief comes from the creation narratives and the universal covenant God is said to have made with the whole of creation after the flood. Therefore the Jewish tradition, despite its strong sense of a covenant relationship with God, gradually began to insist that God is also, at the same time, the "God of the nations."

The dilemma here is an obvious one. Members of the Jewish community either had to worship Yahweh as their tribal god,. allowing for the possibility of other gods who listen to the prayers of other nations, or they, as strict monotheists, had to draw the logical conclusion that God, whom they worshiped as Yahweh, is also the God of all nations. The Hebrew scriptures do not draw out the full theological implications of this strict monotheism, but we get glimpses of it in several parts of scripture. "‘Are you not like the Ethiopians to me, O people of Israel?’ says the Lord. ‘Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt, the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir?"’ (Amos 9:7).

The Book of Jonah is a protest against those who thought God listened only to the prayers of the people of Israel. Jonah felt completely betrayed and let down by God when God listened to the prayers of the gentiles of Nineveh. God could not do otherwise.

The problem is that most Christians, despite their lip service to monotheism, in fact are unconscious polytheists. They allow for other gods to listen to the prayers of their neighbors. They draw boundaries for "their" God and decide where and when their God is allowed to listen, act and bring about wholeness.

If Christians are true believers in the oneness of God, the inevitable conclusion has to be that God, whom we have come to know in Jesus Christ, is the same One who listens to the prayers all people, including the Muslims.

It is in this sense that the answer to the question is an unqualified yes. We all worship the same God. Who else is there to listen to the prayer of a Muslim, Jew, Hindu or Christian except the One in whom all live and move and have their being? For those who want to hang on to monotheism, there can be only one God and one human family.

But is this the whole story? If this is the only consideration, then all religions are the same, and there is no need for people to be Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians.

In fact, we are different because even though we worship one God, different religious traditions have different visions of who this God is, how God relates to humankind and what God requires of us. Here the diversity of perceptions about God makes us into different religious traditions.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam originated in the same geographical area and were in close relationship with each other. It is little wonder that Jews, Christians and Muslims share some parts of their scriptures, some common ancestors like Abraham and some common beliefs about God. But a closer look would also show remarkable differences in their concepts of God and the consequences they draw from them. In fact, as one familiar with the many schools within Hinduism, I as a Christian find myself in closer affinity with some of the Hindu concepts of God than those of the Jewish and Islamic traditions. Happily no one has a monopoly on God.

It should come as no surprise that religions are different and that their concepts of God, despite many commonalities, are quite different from one another. It is in this sense that the answer to the question can also be a qualified no. No, we are not praying to the "same" God as far as our images of God are concerned. In fact, this is why we need interfaith dialogue. We have much to learn from one another about God and God’s ways with humankind.

The discussion does not end there. Does God listen to the prayers only of those who hold the "right" view of who God is and what God requires of us? Would God say, "No, I am not going to listen to the prayers of such and such a group, because they wiped out nations in my name, because they build unjust social structures in my name, because they have gone to war in my name, because they don’t call me by the ‘right’ name, or simply because their doctrines do not quite correspond to who I am"?

If this, as some think, is God’s attitude to prayer, which of us, Christian or Muslim, dare say that God is listening to our prayers! Jesus’ own vision of God is that God causes "the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous" (Matt. 5:45). For God cannot do otherwise.

What then can we say? Does God, whom we celebrate in Jesus Christ, listen to the prayers of a Muslim? If not, why not? Do we, as Christians and Muslims, despite the many ways we think about God, pray to the "same" God? How many Gods do we allow for in the universe?

We have seen that there are now five possible ways of answering the basic question. They are not "right" or "wrong" answers. But the answer we give says something about who we are and who our God is.

How Divided are United Methodists?

In 2001, representatives of the Confessing and the Good News movements and representatives of the Reconciling Ministries Network and the Clergy Alliance for a Professing Church came to DePauw University, where I was chaplain, to discuss homosexuality and the church. Since their divergent positions on homosexuality were well known, I invited the panelists to answer the following questions: "In light of the impasse that the United Methodist Church has seemingly reached on issues related to homosexuality, what path should the denomination take in the future? Should we continue to debate until one side definitively wins and a consensus is reached? Should we strive to revise our denominational polity so that different practices are allowed in different congregations and conferences? Or should we split in some fashion?"

I was surprised at the answers. At the denominational level, the conservatives were winning the day. Church law declared homosexuality incompatible with Christian teaching and forbade ordination and unions for homosexuals. Yet it was members of the Confessing Movement who said they thought it was time to consider dividing the denomination.

I especially remember one conservative, from whose mouth and pen I had previously seen venom flow, saying with great sorrow but also with a tone of generosity to those on the other side of the debate, "Perhaps the only way we are all going to be able to be in authentic ministry is if we admit that our differences are irreconcilable and find a way to effect a just division of the denomination so that we can follow Christ on our separate paths."

In contrast, the liberal panelists, those who were losing the denominational battle, were completely averse to the possibility of a split. They expressed in no uncertain terms their commitment to continue with the debate until they had won and homosexuals received full fellowship in the church.

This same dynamic has just repeated itself at the UMC’s quadrennial General Conference. Delegates reaffirmed and even somewhat strengthened the church’s stance against homosexuality. Meanwhile, Bill Hinson, president of the Confessing Movement, suggested that "the time has come when we must begin to explore an amicable and just separation that will free us both from the cycle of pain and conflict. Such a just separation will protect the property rights of churches and the pension rights of clergy. It will also free us to reclaim our high calling and to fulfill our mission in the world."

Liberal groups rejected the idea. The Common Witness Coalition -- which comprises the Reconciling Ministries Network, the Methodist Federation for Social Action, and Affirmation -- was quoted in a news report as "not in favor of a schism and . . . fully committed to inclusion of all opinions."

As a liberal who more often feels like a stranger in the church he loves than a host, I am puzzled by this dynamic. When those who have won the day on this issue (and by "the day" I mean every denominational vote on the issue since 1972) and are gaining more and more power in the denomination offer the possibility of a just separation, why do those who claim to be on the side of the oppressed want to maintain the oppressive status quo?

I suspect it is because they truly hope and believe that a just consensus (as defined by those of us on the left) can be reached if we simply debate the issue long enough. If this is the reason, then they are misdiagnosing the cause of discontent, and ignoring the schism that has already claimed our church.

What is the root problem of the human condition (i.e., what constitutes sin)?

How does the good news of Jesus Christ’s birth, ministry, death, resurrection and exaltation both reveal and address this problem (i.e., what is salvation and how is it effected)?

What is the mission of the church as the Body of Christ in cooperating with divine salvation in addressing the human condition (i.e., what ecclesiology is to be affirmed in light of answers given to the first two questions)?

And underlying all of these questions: What is the proper understanding and use of scripture in answering these questions?

A resolution on church unity was overwhelmingly passed on the last day of General Conference. It stated that "as United Methodists we remain in covenant with one another, even in the midst of disagreement, and reaffirm our commitment to work together for our common mission of making disciples of Jesus Christ throughout the world." If the delegates had seriously examined the language of the resolution and defined its terms, they would have discovered great disagreement in the church concerning what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. United Methodists disagree about who can be a disciple because we have different understandings of sin and salvation, We must quit using vague and clichéd theological language to patch over our differences.

If we hope to see either a denominational separation or a reuniting of the left and the right as a faithful response to God’s calling for all of us to be church, we must be clear in theological terms about why we must separate or why we should stay together before we determine how to separate or how to stay together.

Moreover, the UMC must carefully explore these theological questions with honesty, because the polarization of the denomination over homosexuality does not represent the full theological spectrum found in our laity and clergy.

The tone of the current debate is set by those at the ends of the spectrum. During the discussion of the resolution on church unity, one delegate, Bill McAlilly, made a passionate plea for involving the "Methodist middle" in the continuing debate in order to "hold the tension of the opposites" and "contain those on both sides of the equation." But McAlilly fails to recognize that the moderates have little power to shape the tone of the debate, because they are the battleground. Those on the left and those on the right are constantly trying to persuade the moderates to vote with their side.

However, if the full theological spectrum of the UMC is laid bare, the moderates will be the ones mediating the separation instead of bearing the brunt of it. Those on the right and those on the left should welcome such leadership from the middle in theological conversations, because if some form of separation occurs, it is they who will ultimately define where (and to some extent how) the theological dividing line is to be drawn.

If the moderate voices are raised and valued in the kinds of in-depth theological conversations I am proposing, in a way that is not possible in the debate about homosexuality, we as a denomination will not only be able to name our differences more precisely, but will be able to celebrate our points of commonality more authentically. Indeed, I would suggest that an extensive process of naming our unbridgeable theological gaps will also expose our unbreakable theological bonds.

The combination of disagreement and agreement may well lead us not to consider splitting but to consider ways we might reorganize into co-denominations of sorts, separating in some ways but covenanting together in some ministries (e.g., relief aid, the publishing house, archives) and administrative programs (e.g., pension and health benefits for clergy). It would be like the Jerusalem leaders giving Paul and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship to go to the gentiles while they went to the circumcised, but asking Paul and Barnabas nevertheless to remember the poor in their work.

I am no longer willing to define Christian unity or even Methodist connectionalism in terms of the specific form of denominational existence. So, Bill Hinson, if you are serious about getting a real conversation going about separating our denomination in order to rescue it, save me a place at the table. I am convinced that as diverse conservatives, liberals and moderates share their deepest theological concerns, we’ll learn a lot about ourselves and each other, about our church and our God. And who knows what kind of Methodist Pentecost might await us at the end of the process.

Turn in the Road

Christians tend to compare their personal conversion experiences to Saul’s encounter on the road to Damascus. Not all of us, of course, talk freely about what happened in us and to us on the way to becoming Christian. Our levels of comfort with such talk vary widely depending on our congregational culture, our notions of evangelism and our ability to be self-revelatory. But when we do think about that journey, and when we’re willing to talk about it, we say that our conversion was -- or was not -- a Damascus Road. We tell our young people that their experience does not need to be a Damascus Road experience, although it can be. There are many paths of Christian transformation -- and the light from heaven is only one of them.

In much of our thinking about this story, there is a tinge of wistfulness, a yearning. Saul’s encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus was so definite, after all. So sure. Even if we dare to describe our own story as similar in some way, it pales next to the drama of the light from heaven. We do not really want something so strange and frightening to happen to us, but we would like the definitive proof that God does exist and that God cares enough about our lives and how we spend them to stop us in our tracks.

But perhaps we focus too much on the style, the process, and not enough on the content. One aspect we sometimes overlook in reading this passage is that violence is the key issue. Saul is characterized in the opening verses as a man of violence. He is a young man in this story; we have been introduced to him in Acts 7 as the young person who took care of the coats of the people who stoned Stephen. The narrator notes that Saul approved of the execution, and he is pictured dragging men and women believers from their homes and imprisoning them.

But then the story veers away from Saul and the tragic events in Jerusalem to follow Philip to Samaria and on to Gaza. When we return to the story of Saul in Acts 9, his violence is still very much a problem. He is breathing threats of murder, obtaining letters from the high priest that authorize him to search for believers in Damascus and bring them back in chains to Jerusalem.

Saul is described almost exclusively in terms of his violence, and it is this violence that Jesus addresses when he speaks out of the heavenly light. Saul hears a voice and the double address of "Saul, Saul" -- alerting the biblical reader that something worth paying attention to is coming next. "Why do you persecute me?" Jesus asks. Saul does not immediately recognize this voice -- and when Jesus identifies himself he addresses the issue of violence again, this time in a statement rather than a question: "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting."

By identifying himself as the one whom Saul is persecuting, Jesus identifies with the believers in their suffering. This identification is in the same spirit as the story of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25. But Jesus is not only identifying with the believers here. He is also making Saul’s violence the central issue of his conversion -- an emphasis that Saul later confirms when he describes his pre- Damascus Road self as one who persecuted the believers to the point of death.

Another aspect that we sometimes miss in our interpretation of what happened on the road to Damascus is that this conversion of Saul is not an individual matter. The community of believers in Damascus plays a critical role. Saul is undergoing his own catharsis; he neither eats nor drinks for three days, and is blind. But another man, Ananias, is about to be transformed too. When Ananias first hears from the Lord what his part in the drama is to be, he is understandably doubtful. He protests. He knows Saul by reputation, and that reputation is not only unsavory but frightening. In his dialog with the Lord, however, Ananias is assured that this unsavory and violent character is indeed someone whom the Lord has chosen. We hear the transformation in Ananias’s mind and heart when he calls Saul "Brother."

The light on the road and the voice that spoke out of the light stopped Saul cold, but his transformation is taken the next step by the ministrations of Ananias as a representative of the believing community in Damascus. The insight that Saul claims in the last verse of the passage, that Jesus is the Son of God, is not a private matter between him and Jesus: "It took a community." And a man of violence is then transformed into a missionary for God.

We will not all be stopped in the road by a brilliant light. We will not all hear a voice calling us by name out of that light, nor have a vision in which the Lord instructs us to go to a specific street and find a specific person and perform a specific ritual. But we can be transformed in the ways Saul was transformed. Relinquishing the violence in ourselves and in our culture, trusting the Christian community to help us do that, is not easy But it is what Jesus, calling to us from his solidarity with the oppressed and persecuted, is asking. Answering that call will transform us.

Sheepish (Psalm 23; John 10:22-30; Revelation 7:13-17)

Although the images of shepherd and sheep wind their way through these lectionary texts, they are difficult images for the contemporary church to embrace. Not only are most of us on this continent far removed from the practices of shepherding; we also believe that the notion has taken on a negative connotation. To describe someone as a sheep, in 2004, is an insult. I recall many of the adults in one congregation cringing during a children’s time a few years ago, when a well-intentioned volunteer tried to teach the children a song that had them "baa-ing" for Jesus. What are we teaching our children, some of us wondered: To follow the crowd without question? To have no mind of one’s own? To expect someone else to take care of us?

But in these readings we have sheep, and we have an abundance of them. In Psalm 23, the most memorized text of the Bible after the Lord’s Prayer, we meet the Lord’s sheep as represented by the psalmist. According to this psalm, the Lord’s sheep do not need anything. They spend their days lying in green pastures. They wander beside quiet, placid lakes and walk along straight paths -- paths of righteousness that might be interpreted as paths with justified margins. The rod and staff of the shepherd protect the sheep and a pleasant "table" awaits them when they’re hungry.

It is a bucolic scene -- until we also notice that the paths of righteousness could also mean the ways of justice. Or until we notice that the poem also talks about walking fearlessly through valleys that are like night, filled with deep shadows. Or until we notice that the table spread with abundant food also happens to be surrounded by enemies. Then the bucolic scene takes on a darker cast and is no longer quite so pleasant to contemplate. The sheep in the psalm become more complicated creatures. They have a double consciousness: they believe in the shepherd’s providence, but that belief does not blind them to the terrors that await them along the ways of justice. It begins to look more like radical trust than blind obedience.

The opening scene in the John passage is similarly pleasant. It is Hanukkah time in a Middle Eastern winter, the author tells us. Jesus is walking in the portico of Solomon’s temple. Jesus’ recreational moment on this feast day, however, is short-lived. Controversy soon arises as some of his opponents challenge him to declare plainly whether he is the Messiah or not. As the end of the passage makes clear, this question is anything but innocent. Jesus sidesteps the danger by pointing to his good works. Those who follow him and believe in him, those who are his sheep, understand that the work Jesus is doing is the result of his identification with, rather than usurping of, God. There is understanding, knowledge and trust between sheep and shepherd. There is also protection, hut it is protection in an ultimate sense rather than as a safe life in the present. This is made abundantly clear when, in the next scene, Jesus’ opponents take up stones with the intent to kill him.

The Revelation text features an eschatological scene in which a number of worshipers robed in white and waving palm branches fall on their faces around the throne of God. Of all the passages in this set of texts, this one is the most idyllic. The worshipers gathered around the throne are promised that they will no longer hunger or thirst. They will no longer be the victims of the burning sun or scorching heat. They will be shepherded by the Lamb at the center of the throne -- a Lamb who is, in an interesting metaphoric turn, also the shepherd who will guide them to the springs of the water of life where God will wipe away every tear.

But even here, where the seer is gathering up the great idealist images of the prophetic texts, there is a heaviness evident. The whiterobed, worshiping "sheep" have come out of an ordeal, They have washed their magnificent white robes in the blood of the Lamb. The Lamb who is the shepherd, it turns out, is also the crucified Christ.

The biblical imagery of sheep and their shepherd does not quite match our assumptions -- be they positive or negative assumptions. None of our metaphors of sheep quite matches the picture of Psalm 23 that we admired in Sunday school. Certainly, faith in God as provider and protector is there -- but so are the shadowed valleys, surrounding enemies, potential lynch mobs, ordeals and even crucifixion.

These sheep are not the blindly obedient animals that we find unsuitable models for children, especially for girls. Rather, the images of sheep are juxtaposed with darker and danker realities. These passages give every evidence of being crafted by thoughtful and deeply experienced writers who are trying to communicate what it means to live by a radical trust in God in the midst of terror, enmity and death -- some of the greatest challenges to faith.

They are not allegorists, drawing out every analogy to sheep that can be made and offering sheep as a model for Christian life. Sheep in the fullness of their animal existence are neither a good model for Christian life nor any other kind of human life. Rather, these writers are metaphorists dipping into the imagery to characterize a feature of faith that carries us through our darkest hours. This trust, like the ways of a sheep with its shepherd, is a radical trust that empowers us to believe that life has Christian meaning, even though our immediate experience may be telling us otherwise.

Capital Gains

Any society, Christian or not, has both a sacred sphere and a profane sphere, a sphere in which love and obligation determine who gets what as against the sphere in which prudence and courage do so. And the two cannot be disentangled. We all live in families, and a church can be viewed from this social-scientific perspective as a sort of family. Businesspeople cannot be routinely avaricious and remain in business any more than a caretaker for a child can, or a dutiful daughter.

Many noneconomists imagine that, on the contrary, avarice is necessary to keep the wheels of commerce turning, "creating jobs" or "keeping the money circulating" -- that people must buy, buy, buy or else capitalism will collapse and all of us will be impoverished. It’s a bubble theory of capitalism, that people must keep puffing -- one version of the old claim that expenditure on luxuries at least employs workers.

I say as an economist that the theory is mistaken. Nothing would befall the market economy in the long run if we tempered our desires down to one car and a small house and healthy foods from the co-op. (And as the economist Robert Frank argues, taxing consumption to bring down rivalrous buying of Ferraris and other symbols of superiority would make us better off even without moderating our desires, though I doubt that rivalrous consumption is a very long-lasting or very important feature of high capitalist economies; notice, for example, that it’s always those other, silly people, not we, who are buying to keep up with the Joneses.) Workers in a temperate economy would not become permanently unemployed.

The mistake is to think that the relevant mental experiment is imagining that tomorrow, suddenly, without warning, we all begin to follow Jesus in what we buy. No doubt such a conversion would be a shock to General Motors. But, an economist would observe, people in the Christian economy would find other employment, and would choose more nonwork activity. It would still be a fine thing to have light bulbs and paved roads and other fruits of enterprise (the commercial version of courage). "In equilibrium," as economists say when making this sort of point, the economy would encourage specialization to satisfy human desires in much the same way it does now. People would buy Bibles and spirit-enhancing trips to Yosemite instead of Monica’s Story and trips to Disney World, but we would still value high-speed presses for the books and airplanes for the trips. The desires would be different, but that doesn’t change how the system works best: private property (such as your labor, your ideas) seeking its best employment; consumers (such as you) seeking the best deal.

I agree with Benjamin Hunnicutt in his remarkable books on the leisure history of Americans that long hours are connected to our great Need-Love for commodities. People following Jesus would by contrast make the plain pottery that an economy of moderation would demand and spend more time with their children. But the point is that the pottery would still be produced most efficiently in a marketing, free-trade, private property, enterprising and energetic economy. We would be richer, not poorer, in the things and deeds we value.

This should be good news for Christians. We do not need to trim our demands for ethical consumption for fear that such a policy would hurt the poor. We do not need to accept avaricious behavior because of some wider social prudence it is supposed to serve, allegedly keeping us employed.

To repeat, it is not the case that market capitalism requires avaricious people. More like the contrary. Markets, I now am claiming, exhibit behavior that Jesus would have approved of -- in fact, behavior that he did, textually, once in a while, approve of. In any event, I want to claim that the imperfect economy we now inhabit contains in its very functioning a large amount of God-regarding virtue.

Consider your own workplace. How does your office or factory actually operate? Really, now. With monsters of prudence running around taking care of Numero Uno? No, not really We find the cartoon strip Dilbert funny because the avaricious behavior of some of its characters is over the top, crazy funny, unacceptably prudent. Workplaces are in fact more like homeplaces. We are morally offended when our workmate complains about our dog in our office: what a nasty thing to do, we think; doesn’t he realize that Janie is important to me; doesn’t he care about me? A wholly prudential worker would not be capable of such sorrow and indignation.

The ethical wholeness of actors in a capitalist marketplace is not a minor, supplementary matter. The writer Don Snyder tried construction work to survive one winter in Maine:

There were six of us working on the crew, but the house was so large that we seldom saw one another. . . . Once I walked right by a man in my haste to get back to a second story deck where I had been tearing down staging. [The contractor] saw this, and he climbed down from the third story to set me straight; "You can’t just walk by people," he said. "It’s going to be a long winter."

The simple point I am making is that markets live in communities of virtue. Supply and demand, money and prices, would still go on working if people had identities more complex than the windup toys of standard economic theory. An ascetic "prefers" oatmeal in her bed-sitter to a six-course breakfast at the Savoy Grill. Yet she will follow the economist’s "law of demand" about oatmeal, buying less if its relative price goes up. She comes to her "tastes" through religious conviction, but in the market the tastes do what they also do in people motivated in other, unchristian ways -- by keeping up with the Joneses, or commodity fetishism, or unthinking acquisitiveness. These too are identities, ethical decisions, though we think poorly of them.

Oddly, the prudence-obsessed economists have themselves been forced recently in their very mathematics to admit that Homo economicus must live with an identity formed in a family within a community of speech constrained by virtues (a non-believer would call it, in summary, "culture"; a Christian would call it "a moral universe"). For example, in "game theory," an aptly named part of high academic economics, it has been discovered that games (such as the nuclear arms race or participation in an economy) cannot be played with prudence-only rules. They break down, just as they do in Dilbert’s office or on the construction site that does not attend to love and justice too. This is true even if one does posit a Homo economicus as a purely hypothetical idea to be pursued as social mathematics.

Off the blackboard it is clear that real economies depend on real virtues. Economists have recently discovered such notions as trust and Institutions, noting what the rest of us always knew, that a deal in a market (such as your employment with all its formal and informal clauses) depends on both prudence and the other virtues. One must belong to a community, since no contract can be explicit about every aspect of a difficult transaction -- and even in buying a newspaper the agent trusts that you won’t suddenly snatch the money back and run out of the store.

When I moved in 1980 from Hyde Park in Chicago to Iowa City, I was startled by the reduction in transaction costs. Every transaction was easier. Checks passed, cleaning ladies worked hard, auto mechanics did what they said they were going to do. Moving back to Chicago in 1999, I observed the contrast again. It is why coreligionists or coethnics are often so successful in business. Their communities of trust give them cheaper loans and cheaper supplies and even insurance in disaster. If you are not virtuous, you get dumped. The overseas Chinese do better as a minority in Indonesia, where they have lived without marrying outside their group since the 17th century, than at "home" in Canton. Mennonites made fortunes in 18th-century Holland. The orthodox Jewish diamond dealers in Brooklyn trade stones worth thousands of dollars on a nod and a trusted word.

Any economy depends on ethical behavior. The other virtues do not drive out prudence or make the New York Stock Exchange into a love fest. The honest workman is still worth his hire. The margin call still comes due. But actual capitalist markets depend on more than prudence. If one performs economic experiments on students, it has recently been found, love, justice, temperance, faith, hope and courage come pouring even out of the laboratories.

So far I have said things that are unpopular with economists but not with Christians. Now I must in fairness turn the tables. I say: Envisioning prudence within the other virtues does not entail abandoning prudence entirely. The mistake of thinking that economics must concern either Only Prudence, on the one hand, or No Prudence at All, on the other, is shared by hard right, hard left and soft center, politically speaking, which is to say that it is shared by most intellectuals. Most intellectuals think that introducing any element of cultural autonomy is devastating to a material explanation of class behavior, say.

A balanced regard for prudence among the virtues has a large effect on how a Christian views the market. The balance can be put so: the market, and the bourgeois ethic that supports it, must be given its due. It is not an invention of the devil. It is not intrinsically ungodly. In fact, as Max Weber noted a century ago, capitalism’s practitioners have often enough been unusually godly folk. Yet the impulse among European intellectuals since 1848 has been never to give the market its due, and to feel in fact that one is being ethical only if one sneers at market outcomes.

The chain of reasoning against the intellectuals goes like this:

1. Virtues underlay the market and its triumph ca. 1830. Not vices, contrary to the cherished views of the intellectuals. Not imperialism, whether Iberian or Northern. Not the slave trade. Not the impoverishment of the working class. Not extractions from the Third World. Not the exploitation of women. This can be shown in statistical detail on each count.

2. The triumph of the market was a necessary condition for modern economic growth.

Marx and Engels say this, of course, in The Communist Manifesto, though from the perspective of year 2000, or even 1948, even their fulsome praise for the accomplishments of the bourgeoisie in "scarce two hundred years" down to 1848 looks like understatement. Modern economic growth did not depend on central planning, nor corporate welfare, nor any sort of theft from the poor. Modern economic growth was not a result of trade unions or government regulation or the welfare state. It was a result of letting markets work.

3. Modern economic growth has been much greater than most intellectuals realize.

Let me go beyond a telegraphic style on this one. It is not true, as many Christians with social concerns believe, that the world is getting poorer. In the past two centuries and especially in the past 50 years, and most especially since the fall of communism, it has gotten much, much richer. Globalization encourages the capitalist engine of growth. If people understood how generous the engine has been, they would have less enthusiasm for protectionism or socialism or environmentalism or economic nationalism in any of their varied forms.

But most educated people believe that the gains to income from capitalism’s triumph have been modest, that the poor have been left behind, that the Third World has been made miserable in aid of the enrichment of the First, that population growth must be controlled, that diminishing returns on the whole has been the main force in world economic history since 1800. All these notions are factually incorrect. But you will find all of them in the mind of the average professor of theology or biblical studies.

Angus Maddison’s recent compilation of national income statistics worldwide, Monitoring the World Economy, 1820-1992, gives a way of measuring the generosity of the capitalist engine. The central fact is well illustrated by the United States. From 1820 to 1994 the real per capita income of the U.S. increased by. . .

Well, take a guess. The exercise of guessing is important if you are to grasp the point. What would you say? What is the rough magnitude of modern economic growth; 1820-1994, from Monroe to Clinton? What are we really talking about when we claim that globalization offers the world’s poor a chance to be much better off? Take a guess, testing how close you come to the educated person’s misunderstanding of the capitalist engine.

Fifty percent? A hundred percent? A doubling since the days of the federalists? All right, 200 percent, a tripling? Surely that is enough credit to give the bourgeois engines of economic growth?

No. Sixteen hundred percent. An increase by a factor of 17. In 1820 the average American, slave and free, produced $1,290, expressed in 1990 dollars, a little below the present average for Africa. In 1995 she earned $22,500.

If you do not find this figure impressive, I suggest you are not grasping it. It is utterly unprecedented. It dwarfs the impact of the invention of agriculture. It means that your great-great-great-grandmother had one dress for church and one for the week, if she were not in rags. Her children did not attend school, and probably could not read. She and her husband worked 80 hours a week for a diet of bread and milk (they were four inches shorter than you are). The scope of human life was radically narrowed -- and is to this day in countries that have not experienced modern economic growth.

You can say all you wish about the spiritual vacuum of modern life, and how we can’t see the sunset in Los Angeles. (In fact the environment has markedly improved in the past century: city air is cleaner after soft-coal and horse manure were banished, and now auto and factory emissions are under attack; more people can get to the countryside; indeed, one can see the sunset in Los Angeles nowadays.) But the factor of 17 represents an enormous freeing of people from drudgery and fear and insecurity.

That is a very good thing -- to go from the level of desperation to the level of hope. Notice the acceleration (greater in the past ten years) -- except for 1913 to 1950, that era of deglobalization, of protection, of foreign policy governed by notions of economic nationalism now recommended by many progressives and conservatives together, and of the wars that come from the mercantilism of Lebensraum and the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, the politics of a noneconomic economics popular among realists.

As the first industrial nation and the champion of free trade Britain’s average annual income went from $1,800 in 1820 to $3,300 in 1870, nearly doubling in the face of exploding population -- during precisely the half century in which the European avant-garde turned against free markets. British income per head was above all others until the New World’s exceeded it (New Zealand in 1903, the U.S. in 1905, Australia in 1906: later the Antipodes slipped for a long while back into protectionist mediocrity). The rest of Europe did not catch up until after World War II -- all the while the avant-garde complaining that Britain was "failing" economically.

Now Britain wobbles upward with the other advanced industrial countries in a band plus or minus a few percentage points from the average, excepting the big, rich nation of churchgoers, which persists at 30 percent above the rest. So much for economic "failure" among the "Anglo-Saxon" leaders of industrialization.

Japan in 1870 was roughly at the present-day Bangladeshi level of income per head, the same as Brazil’s in 1870. By 1939, it had attained the level of U.S. income per head 60 years before (and was double Brazil’s). In 1994, Japan had attained the U.S. income level ten years before (four times Brazil’s). It was a convergence through imitation, saving, education and work -- which then its former colony South Korea repeated. Korea’s income in 1952 was a desperate $860 in 1990 prices. Now it is $10,000. So much for the lasting effects of even an especially brutal colonialism.

If we can hold off neosocialist attempts to divide the wealth before it is created, the whole world can be rich. If India can restrain its Gandhian impulse to throttle the market, it can adopt American ways of retailing. Japanese ways of manufacturing and German ways of chemical-making and enter the modern world of a wider human scope. India does not need to repeat the stages through which Britain and France have traveled (contra the pessimism born of London School of Economics educations among Congress Party politicians that think India needs to go slow, to plan, to wait before leapfrogging into a post-computer world). There is no racial or cultural reason why India cannot in five or ten decades have an American standard of living. The 21st century can be a grand alternative to the Century of Protection (and Slaughter) just concluded.

4. Modern economic growth has transformed the ethical universe for its beneficiaries, who are everyone involved.

Contra the accepted view, there has in fact been no worsening of income distribution. The gap between rich and poor is smaller, not larger.

For example, modern economics are now able to indulge their tastes (as economists put it in their cold way) for environmental change, social justice, human rights. Sine qua non. It is emblematic that the first industrial nation was the first to abolish slavery. Until the rise of a market and bourgeois ideology, until those devout Quaker traders -- even slave traders -- around 1780, it had occurred to no one that slavery was anything but God’s plan.

5. The Malthusian and now environmentalist notion that population growth is itself an evil and is the source of our poverty has been proven false.

The zero-sum politics of the 1930s is ever popular, because pessimism always sounds wiser than optimism, but has been falsified again and again. It is not the case that the final struggle of capitalism, any more than Armageddon, is upon us. On the contrary, the century beginning offers a prospect of ever-widening enrichment: India is starting to see explosive growth; China has been experiencing it now for ten years. And in such countries the environment improves when the people want it to -- that is, when they become well off,

I realize that saying such things brings a hard, unchristian tone into the analysis. But surely it is incumbent upon a Christian heart to help the poor prudently, not in order to save money but in order to really save the poor. Prudence, I said, is a virtue. In such matters, practical wisdom, knowing how to achieve a spiritual end, proves itself.

In the first place, cui bono? Are the poor of Tanzania, say, helped by forgiving debt owed by their government? The forgiving of debt has an "incidence," as economists put it, which may not correspond to its apparent legal placement. You help "the country." But wait: who gets the benefit? If the poor in the countryside get it, good; if the thieves running the government get it, no poor person has been helped. So forgiving debt may not accomplish its ethical intention.

Here is a concrete example of what economists mean by "efficiency" and what I am calling prudence: enriching the rich in Tanzania simply does not accomplish what its label claims; it is inefficient, inefficacious, imprudent.

Second, look at the other side of the transaction. Will big banks continue to make loans to poor countries if the debts are forgiven? Is lack of access to the international capital market a good thing for the poor of Bolivia?

Last and most important, the magnitudes involved are trivial relative to the poverty to be relieved. If the poverty of the Third World was in fact caused by debt to the First World, no one but the worst sort of Benthamite could reasonably object to forgiving it. But it is not so caused. It is caused chiefly by kleptocratic governments or private interests in league with governments that make market exchange unprofitable, that make investment in producing something to exchange silly, that encourage achieving private wealth at the cost of other people’s wealth instead of by working, saving and inventing (economists know this last by the odd term "rent seeking").

The plight of the world’s poor is indeed caused by insufficient Christian charity. It is caused by greed. But the greed and lack of charity is not that of the First World. A Christian economics should concern itself with the ethical grounding not of Danish journalists or American college professors but of African politicians and Latin American generals.

Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God? Part One

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. Jon Levenson’s article is the first in a series.)

In I Kings 18, the prophet Elijah, confronted with widespread defection to Baal among his countrymen, poses a stark challenge: "If the LORD [the conventional English rendering of the four-letter Hebrew name of the God of Israel] is God, follow Him; and if Baal, follow him!" When the people refuse to commit themselves, Elijah proposes an empirical test, which, despite the best efforts of Baal’s own prophets, the Canaanite deity fails, and the LORD alone passes. The people shout out the obvious lesson: "The LORD -- He is God! The LORD -- He is God!"

Elijah’s initial challenge implies that the Israelites are worshiping two deities, either separately or syncretistically, but it also implies -- and the people tacitly agree -- that there is but one "God," the only open question being who he is. Elijah does not accuse his hearers of polytheism or atheism; he accuses them, rather, of catastrophically misidentifying the one particular being who alone is worthy of the title "God." The prophet readily acknowledges that the apostates believe in God, but insists that they do not properly or adequately know the LORD.

An argument can be mounted that since monotheism means that there is only one God, no monotheist can ever accuse anyone -- certainly not another monotheist -- of worshiping another god, only (at most) of improperly identifying the one God that both seek to serve. This is all the more the case with the three religious traditions that claim to worship the God of Abraham, since these exhibit complex patterns of dependence and reciprocal influence. The charge that the two other traditions have seriously misidentified the God of Abraham -- a charge made by each in various ways and times -- is not necessarily the same as the claim that they worship another god.

To the extent that God is characterized by attributes such as uniqueness, omnipotence, foreknowledge, justice, mercy and the revelation of his will in prophecy and scripture, then Jews, Christians and Muslims can easily detect the selfsame God in the LORD of Judaism, in the triune God of the church, and in Allah (which is simply the word for "God" used by Arabic speakers in all three traditions). There is a problem with such reliance on attributes, however, for it actually describes a Supreme Being who is closer to the God of the philosophers than to the God of Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac and Jacob. To state the point differently, to the extent that the one God of the universe is rendered through narratives such as those in the scriptures and not through abstract attributes, the claim that Christians and Muslims worship the same God cannot but appear, if not false, then certainly simplistic and one-sided.

Part of the difficulty here is that Christians and Muslims share no scriptures. The Muslim attitude toward both testaments of the Christian Bible has traditionally run a spectrum that ranges from respect to a charge that large parts of them are rank forgeries (the figure of Ezra is a major villain in the latter view). But even the respect comes with a claim that Christians have dangerously misinterpreted their own holy writ -- for example, in failing to recognize that passages about the Paraclete in the Fourth Gospel foretell the coming of Muhammad.

At times, the Qur’an manifests so much anger at Jews and Christians for failing to see that its teachings constitute the completion of their own scriptures that it pronounces them to be enemies doomed to destruction, For their part, Christians have often seen the variations between the two sets of scriptures as Muslim distortions of the Christian Bible, as if the latter, and not the Qur’an, were the highest standard of truth -- as indeed for them, but not for Muslims, it is. Even when the two sets of scripture speak of the same figure -- such as Abraham, supposedly the common father of all three traditions -- they tell some different stories and draw markedly different lessons, and this makes the term "Abrahamic religions" more problematic than at first seems the case. Abraham appears in the Qur’an as an important link in a chain of Muslim prophets that culminates with Muhammad.

Another term used to describe those three related traditions, "monotheistic," is even more problematic. Although the Qur’an speaks respectfully and appreciatively of Jesus (and Mary as well), it insists that he is only a man, and not God or the son of God: "They are unbelievers who say, ‘God is the Messiah, Mary’s son."’ And since Islam also presents no counterpart to the Christian doctrine of original sin, it can only find all the more alien the orthodox Christian kerygma that God assumed human form to die willingly an excruciating death in atonement for the sin that has affected all humanity since the fall in the Garden of Eden. Indeed, the Qur’an goes out of its way to deny that Jesus died on the cross at all. To the extent that the Christian understanding of God entails the doctrines of Trinity, incarnation and atonement, it is therefore an understanding very different from that of Islam and one that has historically appeared to Muslims to be (at best) less pure and less majestic than their own monotheism.

It might be countered that we should not concentrate on doctrines, but on the ethics of the two traditions, the deeds they mandate. Carried to the extreme, this objection renders utterly irrelevant the question of whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God (which, it should now be clear, is not the most helpful way to pose the issue). In less extreme form, however, the objection implies that one may productively learn about the identity of the God from the practices of his worshipers. Here, too, there are both commonalties and differences.

Jihad, much in the news since 9/11, is one aspect of Muslim ethics that for Christians occasions distress and causes some of them to deny that its practitioners worship the (Christian) God who commands the love of enemies and the practice of non-retaliation. Although a cottage industry has sprung up to define jihad exclusively as an internal struggle to gain self-mastery in order to act morally, the classic Muslim tradition also uses the term to denote war against unbelievers to extend the territory governed by Islam (an idea not without its historical analogues in Christianity and Judaism).

This is not, of course, to deny that the meaning can change or that many Muslims sincerely object to the violent denotation that the word has had. But some do not object, and their position is too well rooted in the tradition to be treated as a contemporary aberration, as if the whole Islamic tradition had somehow been hijacked along with four airliners on 9/11. One of the great ironies of contemporary Christian-Muslim relations is that some Christians who proclaim as a point of principle that there are many ways to be a Christian act as if there is only way to be a Muslim -- the way of nonviolence and interreligious respect. It would be helpful for them to remember that Muhammad is a rough analogy not only to the religious visionary Jesus, whose kingdom was "not of this world," but also to the conquering ruler Constantine, whose kingdom was very much of this world; Islam has consequently had a vastly harder time abandoning its theocratic aspirations.

And it would be helpful for all Christians to acknowledge that their tradition, having mostly abandoned its own theocratic aspirations. has lost control of the culture in ways that cause distress to devout Muslims (but not them alone). I am thinking in particular of the narcissistic body culture and the preoccupation with sexual fulfillment and personal choice that increasingly characterize the West, suggesting to some Muslims a dangerous reversion to paganism and perhaps the moral impotence of Christianity as well.

In the last analysis, the Christian and the Muslim conceptions of the one God have enough in common to make a productive comparison possible, but as in any responsible comparison, the contrasts must not be sugared over. Were a modern Elijah to devise an empirical test to determine which tradition knows God best and worships him most appropriately, the test would, alas, quite fail to convince the members of the other tradition. The dialogue and dispute between Christians and Muslims, which goes back to Mohammed’s own lifetime, will surely continue. One hopes it will do so without terrorism, demonization, political correctness or underestimation of the diversity internal to each religion.

Here be Dragons (Acts 11:1-18; Ps. 148; Rev.21:1-6; Jn. 13:31-35)

Medieval mapmakers, with their limited knowledge of distant lands and uncharted seas, sometimes depicted dragons on the far edges of their maps. Hic sunt dracones ("Here be dragons!"), they warned. One map from 1430 has this text written above a ferocious creature: "Here also are huge men having horns four feet long, and there are serpents also of such magnitude that they can eat an ox whole."

Dragons do not appear on our modem maps. But bodies on the rail lines of Madrid and the streets of Fallujah leave no doubt that Something Ferocious stalks the edges of our political and religious maps. Nationalism, tribalism, empire and religion mutate in draconian forms, and we sometimes fail to recognize the beastly genes in our own DNA.

People in biblical times feared chaos as much as we do, and some developed monster cosmologies to reinforce the idea that brute force can produce order. The Babylonians, for example, said creation happened when Marduk murdered his tyrannical dragon-mom Tiamat by splitting her skull with a club and fashioning the cosmos from her corpse. The Bible itself includes monster theology. The psalmist writes, "Praise the LORD from the earth, you sea monsters and all deeps, fire and hail . . ."

In this beautiful hymn, sea monsters lead a parade of chaos agents that have been subdued to glorify God -- deeps, fire, hail, frost and storm. Steeped in imagery common to the ancient New East, the people of Israel would have called the monsters Leviathan or Rahab. In Hebrew understanding, these mythical serpents represented a universe unrestrained and unredeemed by God’s loving intervention. The same species resurface in Revelation as the dragon and the seven-headed beast.

Modern dismissal of mythical monsters only makes their power more dangerous. Not long after the September 11 attacks, I got a letter from an old friend. In college, we had been committed to peacemaking, but now, after relatives of people in his congregation died on a plane brought down by terrorists, he said:

As a Christian, there is no room in my religion for making war to gain vengeance. Making war to prevent the further senseless slaughter of my countrymen is perfectly justified, however. . . . I have an obligation to defend myself, my family and my neighbors. By choosing to massively attack innocent people, the perpetrators of these acts have lost any right to have their point of view considered by civilized people. Whatever happens to them now is their just due.

Reading that letter still chills me. Beyond the rage I see the profile of the chaos monster. My friend is making a bargain with the creature: let me use you, briefly, in hopes that I can stop others from enlisting your services. Leviathan co-opts a disciple of Jesus into the merciless cycle of violence that kills battalions of soldiers in countless countries and leaves bodies hanging on a bridge in Iraq.

What would the apostle Peter say to us as growing tensions separate Christian from Muslim or Israeli from Palestinian? Perhaps Peter would tell the story of how a beastie-filled vision inspired him to share the gospel with an enemy soldier named Cornelius -- a Roman centurion who held the same rank as the man who supervised the crucifixion of Jesus.

Acts 11 is about the gospel crossing boundaries as daunting as any we have in our world today. Of course, Cornelius was not trying to kill Peter. But Peter later died at the hands of Roman executioners. The early church not only preserved the account of Peter evangelizing a Roman centurion, but also told of how Peter convinced skeptical church leaders that it was God’s design for him to embrace the enemy. Acts features this story as a reconciliation between circumcised and uncircumcised. But in the first century, tension between Jew and gentile could lead to a blood feud.

Christians have options other than further violence when the chaos monster stirs enmity between peoples. In 1999 my colleague Ted Koontz joined other Christians on a trip to Iraq to examine the effects of U.S. sanctions. Koontz later reported that they shared communion with an Orthodox Christian congregation that had "roots deep in antiquity" and even used the same Aramaic words that Jesus may have used at the Last Supper.

Iraqi believers warmly welcomed their foreign guests. "Only days before, an American bomber had destroyed most of a block in the city," Koontz says. "Our countries were enemies, yet we found ourselves embracing as brothers and sisters."

At a time when bombers darkened the skies and devastated the earth below, my colleague experienced "a new heaven and a new earth." In that brief, holy space, God made a home among mortals. At least within that humble group of Americans and Iraqis, death was no more. The old way of revenge and hatred dissolved, and God made all things new.

On the night before his violent death, Jesus said, "By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another" Could the disciples have known on Thursday night of Passover week that on another day, "one another" would include followers of Jesus in every nation on earth? Could they have imagined that, in the death and resurrection of the one they called Lord, God would defeat Leviathan?

System Failure

"A virus breached the campus computer network last week and the entire system crashed. Repair has been difficult, but I bring a word of hope." The director of information technology at the college where I was about to lecture on eschatology added, "This has been frustrating for everyone. Files have been corrupted and programs do not run properly. Please be patient. Some files have been restored. . . . Any day now we will be back to full operation."

How would I begin my lecture on eschatology when the resident computer expert had just summarized the essence of Christian hope? It was all there: the system has crashed, files have been corrupted, everyone is frustrated. War destroys societies and terrorism strikes every continent. Business leaders are convicted of fraud, clergy of unspeakable conduct.

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed . . ." Even W. B. Yeats ("The Second Coming") could not match the poet who penned Revelation. With breathtaking audacity, John blasts the greed, violence and arrogance of an empire that matched any evil we see on CNN. The "divine" Roman emperor (and his empire) is a Beast that "fornicates" with kings of the earth by demanding unholy allegiance. Emperor worship penetrates every aspect of the economy so that no one can "buy or sell without the mark of the beast." Subject peoples kowtow to blasphemous claims of empire. But empire is hubris, and will not last.

Recent pop eschatology novels feature Christians being whisked to the ease of heavenly bleachers as spectators of global suffering. In contrast to such escapism, John of Patmos sees heaven coming to earth. For John, the reign of God comes down from heaven as a beautiful city. In Revelation 21 this artist-theologian visualizes "thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." The New Jerusalem is not simply where we go when we die. It also is the worldwide political and economic arrangement that God is bringing to reality among those who follow the Lamb rather than the Beast.

Last summer I ached for that new reality when I attended a church conference in Zimbabwe. Inflation galloped at such a pace there that locals joked that it was more economical to use the currency as toilet paper than to buy toilet paper. If the "honorable" President Robert Mugabe’s motorcade happened by, friends warned, I was not to make any gesture or say anything that suggested disapproval of the dictator. At a pastor’s home where I stayed overnight, the family was so poor that the sagging mattress was without sheets and pillowcases. Starvation stalked parts of Zimbabwe, and most people are unemployed. Things fall apart.

Meanwhile my country has spent billions of dollars to bring an oil-rich nation to its knees. My airfare to Zimbabwe cost the equivalent of 6 million Zim dollars. The disparity of resources was of apocalyptic proportions. It is too simplistic to blame the U.S. for Zimbabwe’s woes. There is homegrown evil there too. But something has put the world economy off-center and blinded my nation to justice. If God "judges the peoples with equity and guides nations upon earth," this comfortable Westerner should brace for judgment.

John of Patmos blamed Rome for the greed and violence that enslaved millions and enriched the few. He was certain "Babylon" would fall -- as all empires eventually do. With unblinking eye, John foresees the long death throes of Rome and its global tentacles. But it is shining light from the New Jerusalem envisioned at the end of Revelation that illuminates the landscape and provides sustaining hope.

What a city! Make no snide remarks about "streets of gold," because Revelation 21 depicts a radical new economic and political order that will replace the banks and corporations and armies that dominate our world. Built on a foundation of the apostles of Jesus Christ, the New Jerusalem will encompass the whole world as John knew it -- 1,500 miles from one end of the Roman Empire to the other.

The New Jerusalem already is "coming down out of heaven." John’s vision is a mission mandate for the church to be a global harbinger of the city whose "gates will never be shut." The city is so inclusive that even "kings of the earth will bring their glory into it." Kings of the earth! Just a few chapters ago they’re in bed with the Beast, and now God designs to redeem even them? Watch amazed as Saddam Hussein, Ariel Sharon, Robert Mugabe, George Bush and countless others lay down their weapons, share resources and follow the Lamb.

An embarrassment of wealth is shared by all in the New Jerusalem. No America-Zimbabwe disparity here! The Lamb is at the center of this startling political and economic transformation, and from the city flows a "river of the water of life." Leaves from a tree nurtured by the river bring healing to the nations -- healing for Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Colombia, Sudan and America.

The system has crashed, and only God can fix it. With the promise of restoration any day now, the "Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come."’ This same Spirit, Jesus declared, would remind his followers of "all that I have said to you." Jesus said a lot about how we live, and the Spirit nudges us to put this teaching into practice. No, the church is not a full realization of the New Jerusalem. But we who follow the Lamb have our citizenship and primary loyalty there, and we already live in its transforming light.