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God’s Will and the Coronavirus

I’m not surprised some people are blaming God. Maybe “crediting” God is more accurate.

I’m reading social media posts saying the Coronavirus (Covid 19) is God’s will. Our current suffering is part of some predetermined divine plan.

One post put it this way:

“Sorry to break up the big panic, but the Coronavirus will not take anyone outta this world unless that’s the good Lord’s plan. And you’re not gonna change that no matter what you do or what you buy.”

If this view is true, no need to worry. No need to prepare, defend, protect, sacrifice, or act. It’s all in “the good Lord’s plan.”

Not the Plan!

I don’t believe the Coronavirus is God’s plan. God is not causing a pandemic that kills some, makes many miserable, and has widespread adverse effects on society.

God did not cause this evil!

Those who say, “God is in control” often claim all that happens, good or bad, is part of a master plan. Every torture, murder, rape, disease, war, and more are part of the divine blueprint.

Your sister’s rape? God’s plan. That miscarriage you suffered? God’s plan. Every ruthless dictator or fascist system? God’s plan. Cancer, meth addiction, leukemia, severe disability, and so on? God’s plan.

The Coronavirus? God’s plan.

I don’t buy it. I can’t believe a loving God would design that kind of plan! If that’s what God’s love is like, I want nothing to do with God!

God Allows the Virus?

Fortunately, a large number of people today reject the idea God is causing the current pandemic. Unfortunately, a large number believe God allows or permits it.

Does that make sense?

Those who say God allows evil imply God could stop it singlehandedly. If God wanted, God could end this pandemic with a solo act of control. For some reason, say these people, God is allowing death, illness, and widespread harm.

Suppose one of my kids began strangling another of my children. Suppose I could step in and stop this act of violence. But suppose I allowed it – and the death of my child – saying, “I didn’t cause this killing, so don’t blame me!”

No one would consider me a loving father if I failed to prevent the evil I could have prevented. Fathers who allow their kids to strangle one another are not loving.

Those who say God permits the Coronavirus make a major mistake. They undermine our belief in a perfectly loving God. Just as a loving father wouldn’t allow his kids to strangle one another, a loving God wouldn’t allow a virus to wreak widespread death and destruction.

It makes no sense to say, “It isn’t God’s will, but God allows it.”

“See the Good that’s Come…”

Many who claim God causes or allows the Coronavirus will see some good that comes from our current crisis. They’ll point to stories of self-sacrifice or the good that comes from people cooperating to combat this pandemic.

Upon seeing the good that comes from the pandemic, some will use a “greater good” argument.  “We’ve learned something valuable from the Coronavirus!” they might say. “This pandemic has taught us we don’t need all the stuff we thought we needed.” “It took a virus for us to learn to slow down and focus on what's important.”

Good things will come from the evils we currently face. Count on it. But we shouldn’t say God causes or allows evil for this good. It isn't part of some predetermined plan.

Instead, we should think God squeezes some good from the bad God didn’t want in the first place.

God never gives up on anyone or any situation. Working with a broken and diseased creation, God works to wring whatever good can be wrung from the wrong God didn’t cause or allow.

It’s a Mystery

A growing number of people recognize the theological problems that come from saying God caused or allowed the Coronavirus. Instead of offering a better way to think about God’s action, however, they appeal to mystery.

“We don’t know why God acts this way,” they say. Some of the more sophisticated thinkers will say God doesn’t “act” in any way we can understand.  What it means to say “God acts” is an absolute mystery. Finite beings can’t in any sense understand an infinite God, they say.

Others play the mystery card by saying God is uninvolved. Deists say God created the world long ago but now has a hands-off approach. This God watches the world from a distance as it suffers. This God has the power to stop the mayhem but sits on the sideline eating popcorn.

I wonder why anyone believes in a God of absolute mystery. If we can’t provide plausible answers to our deepest struggles and biggest fears -- including the Coronavirus -- why believe in God at all?

If God's ways are not our ways, no way is as good as any other.

A Better Way

There’s a better way to think about God’s will and the Coronavirus.

This way says God wants to defeat the virus. God desires to prevent the deaths and destruction we currently see. This way says God loves everyone and everything, from the most complex to the least. And God always actively engages the fight against the Coronavirus, at all levels of existence and society.

This better way says God can’t defeat the Coronavirus singlehandedly. God needs our help. In this time of struggle, God needs the best of medicine, the best from social leaders, and the best from each of us.

I call this view “the uncontrolling love of God,” and I’ve written academic and popular books explaining its details. See my best-selling book, God Can’t: How to Believe in God and Love after Tragedy, Abuse, and Other Evils or my more academic book, The Uncontrolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of Providence. This theology says God’s love is inherently uncontrolling. And because God loves everyone and everything, God can’t control anyone or anything.

The uncontrolling God of love is the most potent force in the universe! But because love does not force its own way (1 Cor. 13:5), even the strongest Lover cannot control others.

God’s Will for Us

What is God’s will? In one sense, it’s the same today as every day: to love God, love others, and

In our current crisis, God’s specific will changes. God calls each person, each family, each community, and each political structure to unique responses of love. These specific calls are particular to what each creature can do in each situation. God calls us all to act in loving ways in light of what’s possible.

For most, social distancing can be a significant form of love. Sharing provisions – including toilet paper – can be another. Cooperating with health officials can be a powerful expression of love. Taking reasonable precautions can be an act of love. And so on…

We are always called to love. Our present crisis presents new challenges in discovering what love now requires. I commit to doing my best to discern and then respond to God’s calls of love.

I hope you join me. God does too.

Will China Democratize?

Professor of political science at Columbia University Andrew J. Nathan is keen on the tenacity of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to survive and stay in power, by its selective responses to the demands of certain sectors of Chinese populace and expedient reforms and relatively democratic ways within the government—all are to him, indications of the “authoritarian resiliency” of the CCP. Senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University Larry Diamond sees the countries of the world as heading more and more in recent decades towards democratic ways as if such a trend is inevitable (but also unpredictable). His yardstick for measuring democracy, however, is primarily one of national election, Western-style, while China “remains one of the very few countries in the world today that does not even pretend to choose its leaders by popular election” (p. xi ). Vice president for research and studies at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) Marc F. Plattner represents an organization whose definition of democracy is much more stringent in its demands with criteria of democratic inclusivity (as shown in a short essay by its funding officer, Louisa Greve, cited below). Will China Democratize? begins with a composite Introduction to the topic by all three editors (Nathan, Diamond, and Plattner), followed by thirty articles by both Chinese and Western authors carefully selected from the Journal of Democracy (coedited by Diamond and Plattner). These were published in recent decades from the journal’s inception in 1990 to 2013. Among them three are by editor Nathan and one by Greve, who managed NED’s China grants program for fifteen years. Richard Madsen is the only sociologist writing about “The Upsurge of Religion in China.” He underscores the independent and uncontrollable nature of religion, especially those outside the purview of the five official religions in the PRC. But he notes the strong control in China of all organized activities which includes religion, particularly Christianity. The latter has only the option to follow the directives set by the Communist Party, while trying to carve out space for its own authentic Roman Catholic and Protestant selfhood amid overbearing constraint. The Epilogue includes two articles by 2011 Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo posted on a Chinese website in 2006, translated in the Journal of Democracy, January 2011. Liu was the principle drafter of “Charter 08,” patterned after Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77, calling for democracy and respect for human rights. Charter 08 resulted in Liu’s imprisonment and eventual exile from China.

With so many different and conditional views on the prospects for democracy in China, there is little agreement but significant areas of overlap between them. They all anticipate the need and inevitability of change in the political system of the People’s Republic, but cannot be certain as to when and how change will come about, because of the manifold contingent forces both within and outside of China. However, it is possible to group several of the articles as falling in the general realm of Nathan’s “authoritarian resiliency,” which has the longevity of an indefinite future. The other grouping can be under Diamond’s world trend towards democracy. If we do not limit democracy to only the official election of leaders on the national level and as the main criterion, then we can accept the fact that democracy can have many different forms. Minxin Pei (pp. 99-113) admittedly “sides with the skeptics in rejecting authoritarian resilience” by opting for the classical view that autocracies by their very nature of having absolute power and unchallenged privileges with no checks and balances inevitably leads to looting and corruption. With uncontested power, members of the ruling party behave in such a ruthless manner that results in sowing the seeds of their own destruction. This is despite the sophistication of the Communist Party, says Pei, in effective economic patronage in building a supportive wealthy and influential social elites through cooptation. The Party’s expedient oppression of the protesting masses (albeit selectively) by nipping them at the bud before any become fully organized or joined by other dissidents is also effective. However, the very nature of autocracies, Pei reminds us, with their propensity of endemic corruption is fundamentally towards self-destruction. Pei’s analysis is a sobering one, worth underscoring. Furthermore, wei wen,??, “stability maintenance” in proactively controlling the discontent of its citizens from getting out of hand, according to Xi Chen’s “The Rising Cost of Stability” can run into millions. The budget for such, he tells us, was more than the PRC’s military budget for 2011 (pp. 278-286). On this point there are parallels to America’s exorbitant spending on national security since the inception of George W. Bush’s “global war on terrorism” in 2001.1

In today’s information age, it is interesting to note how much the Internet plays in establishing a network of netizens that globally extends beyond the geography of China in criticism and opposition to the Chinese government, as noted by several of the authors. Rebecca McKinnon, cofounder of “Global Voices Online,” however, warns that the government can equally and even more effectively make use of the very same Internet for its own purpose of propaganda manipulation and control. In “China’s ‘Networked Authoritarianism’,” she shows how “strong governments in weak or new democracies are using second- and third-generation Internet controls in ways that contribute to the erosion of democracy and slippage back towards authoritarianism.” All the while the disgruntled and protesting netizens of China’s network may still be fixated on first generation ways of communication (p. 268). In support of its priority of stability maintenance the CCP also exploits and diverts the energy of the masses towards Chinese nationalism. The CCP stirs the nationalistic emotions of the people by contesting Japan over issues such as: the disputed territorial claims with China: its writing of history that omits Japanese atrocities in its invasion of China, and in recent visits by its leaders to Japan’s Yasukuni shrine which honors national heroes including convicted war criminals.2

The more than thirty articles in Will China Democratize were written by scholars in political science, astrophysics, business, law, public policy, politics, government, history, sociology, communications, and literary criticism. None are by philosophers or more specifically, philosophers of culture. If we were to look at the question of “Will China Democratize?” in terms of China’s intent in the last thirty years of returning and reinterpreting its multimillennial culture of civility and wisdom, the possibility of China democratizing is much more promising. This potential seems evident in the recent laboring pangs of the rebirth of the once jettisoned Confucian tradition in the twentieth century. With close to 400 Confucian institutes established in different countries of the world, the PRC is serious about promoting Chinese culture. Within China itself, however, “Confucius” after decades of cultural iconoclastic conditioning, still seems to elicit a negative emotional reaction. The revival of Confucianism indirectly is supported by the resurgence of the study of the philosophy of John Dewey in recent decades in different parts of the world, including China. Pertinent to this discussion is a recent publication of Democracy As Culture: Deweyan Pragmaticism in a Globalized World, edited by Sor-Hoon Tan and John Whalen-Bridge, both on the faculty of the National University of Singapore with a dozen articles by different authors on Dewey and Confucianism. In the Introduction editors Tan and Whalen-Bridge acknowledge their debt to Philosopher Richard Rorty (1931-2007), whose germinal work had revived John Dewey (1859-1952) and his pragmatism as a contribution not only to education, but in governance as well in his social democracy. They see Deweyan democracy not so much as a political system, but more as a way of life, “a set of practices, attitudes, and expectations, which, in an ideal society, would pervade every aspect of human interaction.” Such a comprehensive way is also seen in the Confucian tradition where Deweyan social democracy resonates so well. Furthermore, the editors are exercised over America’s attempt under George W. Bush to bring democracy to the Greater Middle East. They insist that “if democracy really has a global destiny (as many in the West regarding their own polity would suggest), it must grow out of, rather than replace, the values of different cultures, for any democracy promoted by the West that is contextual as culturally hegemonic will be a democracy in name only.”3

A perspective based on Chinese cultural values is found in an article entitled “Whither Democracy in China: The Complimentary Views of Five Scholars of Chinese Traditions.” The essay suggests that if and when China emerges as a democracy, it will be a “communal type” of “Confucian democracy,” however oxymoronic the term may sound to people outside of China. This Asian authoritarian form of governance with democratic ways today can be seen in varying degrees in countries and places such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong—all with intimate experience of Confucianism.4 Lawyer Randall Perenboom suggests that just as law in any country must be “context specific,” so also is democracy. There is no such thing, he adds, as “one size fits all.” He is hopeful that the rule of law (where no one is above the law) as opposed to rule by law (for the benefit of the rulers) has slowly evolved in China today. People can even sue the government for violating what it had promised as the rights of the people in the Chinese constitution, also noted in Will China Democratize?

Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall highlight the communitarian nature of Chinese society rooted in the family as the essential metaphor expanding to everyone, (“big family,” da jia, ??), the society, state, (“nation family,” guo jia, ??), the family writ large with rulers seen as father and mother overseers, and even beyond to larger circles of inclusivity. (For accentuating the positive, we will set aside the negative aspect of communal connectedness as overbearing and even debilitating as familial entanglements.) They resurrect John Dewey, who for more than two years (1919-1921) lectured in China where he was named a “Second Confucius,” as he expounded his pragmatic ways of education and learning in a “communicating community” through social participation. They also see the challenge of democratic inclusivity in China as the need to address the problem of Han chauvinism (which they term “Oriental orientalism”) that lauds Han superiority over the national minorities. Condescension, control, and oppression towards minorities of Tibet and Xinjiang are poignantly described by Greve in “The Troubled Periphery” in Will China Democratize? However, she also notes a glimmer of hope in that some Han Chinese are sympathetic to and supportive of the rights and selfhood of China’s national minorities. These minorities are the Tibetans and the Uyghurs of Xinjiang who prefer the term “East Turkestan” for their homeland (pp. 169-174).

Wm. Theodore deBary, who is first and foremost an educator, does not believe that democracy is the natural outcome of economic growth. Democracy for him requires the dogged and sustained vigilance and effort of public intellectuals and people of conscience. Though perhaps an impossibility, the attempt to bring about a more excellent social order through unceasing education is an imperative and itself a meaningful and worthy project. A chapter in Will China Democratize? shows more and more university graduates are appearing in China today, including those among the new members of the Communist Party. However, despite the latter’s sustained attempt to coopt intellectuals, their growing numbers along with other social elites in the emerged middle class will soon exceed the Party’s ability of cooptation. Pei surmises the fragility of the CCP in light of “the potential pool of opposition leaders,” especially university graduates who are facing difficulty in finding employment (p. 109). The communal nature of Chinese life as depicted by de Bary resonates with Dewey’s social democracy. Individual rights are discovered in “rites” of participation for the common good that their “rights” are realized. Rights and privileges are inseparable from obligations and duties in community.

Henry Rosemont, Jr. highlights the difference between Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and to some extent Islam) which affirm an intelligible universe capable of being fully understood by human rational and moral faculties, while the less ambitious sages of Asia provide only directions, guiding us to lead more meaningful lives in this world, where full understanding will always be elusive and ambiguous. In short, to learn how to live in it, rather than to concentrate on learning about it. He suggests that leaders in the U.S. government can continue to share their democratic system with the world, but more important, they cannot force America’s most cherished values on others.

Will China Democratize? Prudens Quaestio Dimidium Scientiae, “Asking the right question is half the answer.” More importantly, asking the right question in the right way is more necessary, not from the perspective of one’s own culture, but from that of the other. Authors of the book edited by Nathan, Diamond, and Plattner have provided us with the imperative and perils of the possibility (or impossibility) of democracy in the People’s Republic. Though difficult to predict, all of the authors seem to indicate that change is inevitable. Liu Junning expresses it succinctly in describing China in recent decades, “The established ideology has been withering away both as an ideal and in practice, even though the regime that imposed it remains in place. Virtually no ‘true believers’ are left in China. There is an unbridgeable chasm between the official ideology and the reality of the market economy. The two cannot exist in harmony for long; one of them must give way” (p. 191). Philosophers of Chinese Culture, however, less pessimistic, see more of the promise of democracy in China based on the intentional and eventual recovery and rejuvenation of its authentic rich culture. This will not happen until the people and leaders, after centuries of deprivation, finally reaching Deng Xiaoping’s admonition in the end of the 1970s that “to get rich is glorious,” but also come to realize (if ever) that it takes much more than wealth and power to provide a good life for all its people. All in all, if and when China democratizes, we can be certain that it will be on its own terms.

Notes:

1. “Tomgram: Englehardt, Believe It or Not National Security State” in TomDispatch.Com, January 5, 2014. See also Tom Englehardt’s book The United States of Fear. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011).

2. Carol J. Williams, “Abe visits shrine to Japanese war dead angering neighbors, U.S.” in Los Angeles Times, December 26, 2013. Also “A Slap in the Face: Shinzo Abe takes a dangerous gamble” in The Economist, January 4, 2014.

3. Democracy As Culture: Deweyan Pragmatism In a Globalizing World, edited by Sor-Hoon Tan and John Whalen-Bridge. (Albany: State University of New York, 2008). Tan is Associate Professor of Philosophy, National University of Singapore, while Whalen-Bridge is Associate Professor of English, also at National University of Singapore.

4. I wrote the article almost a decade ago for China News Update, January 2005, a publication of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), 100 Witherspoon Street, Louisville, Kentucky 40202. The essay was a virtual summary of four books by these philosophers, one of whom, Perenboom, is a law professor who knows China: 1) Randall Pereboom, China’s Long March Towards Rule of Law. Cambridge University Press, 2002. 2 and 3) Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall, The Democracy of the Dead: Dewey, Democracy, and the Hope for Democracy in China. Open Court, 1999. 4) Wm. Theodore de Bary, Nobility and Civility: Asian Ideal of Leadership and the Common Good. Harvard University Press, 2004. 5) Henry Rosemont, Jr., Rationality and Religious Experience: The Continuing Relevance of World Spiritual Traditions. Open Court, 2001).

After a Child Dies

When my wife and I see news reports about the deaths of young people, as we did after the grisly slaughter at Virginia Tech last April, we inevitably think back to June 1999, when we lost our son, Daniel. He was a healthy, jovial and playful boy, and his sudden, unexpected death was devastating. Because of our own bereavement, our reactions to the deaths of children inevitably include a deep sympathy for the surviving parents.

We think about the horror that the parents will be facing in the weeks, months and years to come. It is possible to look at the parents who agree to be interviewed and to detect the numbness that accompanies survivors in the days after such a tragedy. We think to ourselves: "Those poor parents. They have no idea how hellish their lives are probably going to become in the next few years."

I suppose this sounds pretty dark. But having lived through the trauma, I can testify that I had no wisp of a clue what the subsequent years would feel like. Parental grief is grueling and can lead to all sorts of mental hell.

One has to work through multiple myths about this ordeal. People will say, for instance, that time heals all wounds. But about two years after Daniel’s death I was feeling not better but markedly worse. I was so discouraged and often so physically and emotionally anesthetized that I began to do research on the clinical findings about parental grief. I undertook this research mostly as an attempt to figure out if I was losing my mind and if I would ever start feeling better about life.

The findings of clinical psychologists helped me to understand several things. First, my reactions were normal and predictable. I was not losing my mind, but experiencing what the vast majority of bereaved parents experience. Feeling numb and short of breath, thinking incoherent thoughts--this is common. Looking around and expecting Daniel to run in at any moment is not a sign of mental illness. Seriously questioning the nature of God is not unusual for people of faith. My emotional and physiological responses were quite predictable.

Another piece of bad advice I heard was to "let go of the dead child and go on with your own life." This sort of advice has its roots in the modern theories of grief that considered extended and grueling patterns of grief to be pathological. In Mourning and Melancholia (1917), Sigmund Freud makes a famous distinction between mourning, which is the normal reaction to the loss of a loved one, and melancholia, which is a form of mental illness. According to Freud, grieving people need to break free from the deceased, let go of the past and reassert their individualism by charting a new course for life. A healthy grief experience, according to Freud, is one in which the deaths of loved ones will not leave "traces of any gross change" in the bereaved.

But Daniel’s death left very intense and never-ending changes in my wife and me. More than eight years later we still think about Daniel every day, miss him a lot and refuse to let go of him. Clinical workers are now discovering that this is not only predictable but probably much healthier for the bereaved. For decades, counselors for the bereaved urged them to let go of the dead and get on with their lives, an approach that has been called the "breaking bonds" method. Oddly, this approach is still common, in spite of an abundance of clinical evidence showing it to be misguided. In reality, research has consistently shown that lifelong grief is normal in cases of the loss of close family members, especially children.

Psychologists are recognizing the importance of maintaining bonds with the dead. In my own case, I still feel a deep connection with my son, and I have no intention of ever trying to break that bond.

Parental bereavement brings about a crisis of meaning. Losing a child challenges one’s view of the world, leading frequently into a kind of despair and hopelessness. A child evokes a connection with the past, an investment in the future and an extension of self. To say it another way, a child is a concrete expression of hope in the future, and when a child dies, much of a person’s hope dies as well. In my case, I wandered around in a sort of hopeless trance for at least a couple of years, if not more. I did my duties, taught classes and graded papers, even went to church, but somehow I felt as if none of it really mattered very much. Days and weeks went around and around.

And since Daniel was our only child, Hiroko and I felt forlorn in not having a legacy for the future--and still do, in many respects. Our loss challenged our previous assumptions about the purpose and meaning of life. Since Daniel was such an important part of the meaning of our lives, what was left for the future?

One of the most disturbing clinical studies I came upon showed that this psychological state of "overwhelming life meaninglessness" does not necessarily change with time. In other words, there is clinical evidence that the adage "Time heals all wounds" really does not fit parental bereavement. (I was also beginning to realize that healing itself is a Freudian metaphor based on the mistaken idea of grief as illness.) Actually, the opposite might be more accurate: there may be an intensification of pain, especially in the third and fourth years after the loss.

To put it in even grimmer terms: studies show that parental grief actually gets worse with time. I recall discovering that stunner in about the second year after Daniel’s death, and it was pretty depressing to realize that I might not have bottomed out yet. My wife had, however. She suffered a nearly complete meltdown approximately18 months after Daniel died. At first, Hiroko had seemed particularly numbed, and I wondered why she was so unemotional about our loss. Meanwhile, I was hyperventilating, having trouble sleeping, and frankly asking God why he hadn’t just taken me instead. I was also feeling tremendous guilt, though it was nowhere near the sheer horror yet to come.

One of the oddities of the research on parents who lose children is the differences in spiritual reaction that survivors can experience. Some parents turn completely and permanently away from church, God and belief of any sort. Others turn even more toward God and find their religious faith rejuvenated and strengthened. And then there are some who experience a little bit of both responses--they seemingly deal with both increasing doubts about God and increasing faith, however strange that might sound.

One of the greatest consolations in my own experience has been the realization that I actually do believe in God. I have been reminded over and over of the powerful ending to the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7, where Jesus describes a storm hitting two different kinds of houses, one built on sand, the other on solid rock. Over these eight years, I have been thankful so many times to realize that there was a little bit of rock underneath my life.

At times I have even wondered why Hiroko and I have continued to believe. My short answer is in two parts: you cannot deny what you know to be true, and ultimately it is God who is in control. And the amazing reality is that, for whatever reasons, we did evidently know something, and we do still believe in the reality of God and his kingdom.

It is very hard to say all that without sounding arrogant, but there it is. I often ask why were we fortunate enough to have something real underneath our feet, while so many others discover, when challenged by similar disasters, that their beliefs were no more real to them than fairy tales. Here the arrogance dies away, because I really do not have the slightest clue. Nevertheless, I am thankful that something real remains for us. As with our view of gravity and similar phenomena, denial has simply not been an option for us.

A great deal of research indicates that both parents sustain powerful bonds with the dead child. Ironically, Freud was never able to get beyond the loss of his 27-year-old daughter Sophie, and later, of Sophie’s four-year-old son. Freud’s personal experiences with profound grief indicate the dilemmas created by his own theory. Though his ideas suggested that one must cut ties with the dead, he was unable to do so. Freud’s actual response trumped his own theory.

The Freudian fixation on cutting ties with the dead is rooted in an obsessive atheism that demands that one reject the possibility of reunion and realize that the loved one is no more. Much clinical evidence has rejected a good deal of the Freudian method. Grieving parents have generally tended to reject it in their own reactions, too.

Time after time, surviving parents describe how the dead child will continue to live on in their hearts, and thus act as a motivation for the survivors to give back to society. The focus on a continuing bond with the dead reveals a belief in the possibility of human redemption in the face of tragic circumstances. This redemptive aspect of tragedy is documented repeatedly in the stories that parents tell about the memory of their child. Much evidence, for example, shows how survivors often become more compassionate and merciful after losing a child. Often, memories of the dead have spurred surviving parents on to good works that benefit humankind, all done as a legacy to the lost child. One small example of this is the Daniel Foundation, a charitable trust that we set up in our son’s memory. Among other things, the foundation supports ministries and charities that work with urban at-risk youth. We hope that our bond with our son will live in perpetuity through the Daniel Foundation.

I recall listening to the father of Reema Samaha being interviewed about his beautiful daughter, a bright student at Virginia Tech and a skilled creative dancer. As he spoke, images of Reema dancing on stage were broadcast. Joseph Samaha emphasized how he and his family would keep Reema alive forever in their hearts, and that her life would continue to have meaning. "She did not die in vain," he said. Her life committed to art and beauty would continue to reap redemptive benefits.

In these moving comments, it is clear that parents do recognize that the bonds with the dead child continue even after death. They know that the legacy of their child does not need to dwindle away into oblivion. Though some people might like to dismiss these sorts of sentiments as wishful thinking, melodramatic affectation or worse, they actually emerge from deeply held beliefs about the power of suffering, the motivational memory of the beloved, and ultimately the hope of a potential reunion. "I keep her in my mind," Samaha said. "Her face is in my mental vision. It keeps me going."

Losing Daniel was a thunderclap of a blow. The trauma of parental grief is horrific and long-lasting. Now over eight years later, my wife and I are managing to breathe deeper, and we have managed to continue our journey. But like Joseph Samaha, I sense that the presence of my child is always there to keep me going, as corny as that might sound. I am also comforted that somehow, miraculously, we still remember God, the one who holds all things together by the word of his power (Heb. 1:3). And I am thankful that something real was underneath it all.

Finally, since we are also told in scripture that "the spirit will return to God who gave it" (Eccles. 12:7) and that he will most assuredly "wipe away every tear" (Rev. 21:4), we do hold out hope for a reunion with our son. Soon enough, I suppose, we will know the truth about these matters. Until then, and hopefully for long after, our bond with Daniel will continue.

Making Belief Intelligible

Karl Barth famously attacked apologetics--the attempt to offer a persuasive account of Christian belief on mutually agreed-upon grounds of reason--as a misguided task, part of the failure of theological liberalism. When you focus on making sense to those outside the faith, Barth warned, you end up adopting their worldview. When you lean way over to speak to the secular world, you end up falling into it.

If Barth's analysis doesn't make you shy away from apologetics, the crude way that apologetics is often practiced may do so. Books like Josh McDowell's Evidence That Demands a Verdict or Lee Strobel's The Case for Faith overstate the rational basis for faith. Even C. S. Lewis had his bad days operating in this field. His famous remark that Jesus was either who he said he was or a liar or lunatic appears to present a logical choice, one that directs the reader toward faith. But are there really only three options? Such syllogisms produce few believers and even fewer lovers of God.

Apologetics has largely lost its place in mainline seminary curricula. But the task of apologetics--making Christian belief intelligible--remains inescapable. If it isn't done well, it will be done badly.

The postmodern claim that all truth is relative to a context or tradition has created a new situation for apologetics. All that postmodern apologists need to do is show that their opponents also stand in a particular tradition that has its own unverifiable presuppositions. Science, for example, rests on presuppositions like this one: "The world is governed by natural forces and everything can be explained if we understand these natural forces." This is a philosophical presupposition that is not falsifiable and therefore not subject to scientific inquiry.

Postmodern apologists can be divided into two schools, the humble and the bold. The humble apologists simply want to argue that the Christian way of life is the most desirable way of life, on the basis of the kinds of people that the belief system fosters. If a belief system creates a cantankerous neighbor or a militaristic extremist, then few people would want to embrace that individual's belief system. As Origen argued in an earlier age, Christianity must be true because it creates the best people. Justin Martyr pointed out that Christians promoted peace in the empire and paid their taxes, didn't commit adultery or kill or abandon their children. Humble apologetics is often an argument about ethics, with lots of examples.

The bold apologists aim to show that their account of the world makes better sense of it than all other accounts and that non-Christian belief systems collapse from inner contradiction. The bold apologists might look at the Darwinist concept of survival of the fittest and argue that Darwinism cannot account for the phenomenon of love. Why are so many people willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of someone else and not just for their own survival? Darwinism, the argument goes, cannot account fully for the way we experience the world. By contrast, the Christian story of creation by a good God and of humanity's fall into sin is able to make sense of why people are capable of both love and evil. And it can answer the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" with "Because God created the heavens and the earth."

Francis Collins, former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute and author of The Language of God, is something of a hybrid apologist. He doesn't try to show that science is inadequate, only that it isn't adequate by itself. He aims to show that both science and faith are necessary to explain the world. For Collins, science answers questions about the natural world and faith answers questions about the spiritual world; the tools for exploring one world are not appropriate for exploring the other.

This clear separation of realms has been called into question by many postmodernists, who see more fluidity between science and religion. So in one sense Collins fails to question modernist assumptions. Nevertheless, he attacks the views of scientists such as Richard Dawkins who think that science leaves no room for faith and that science has shown belief in God to be a delusion. One of the world's leading scientists, Collins insists that faith is not incompatible with science. The two are simply answering different questions. Science cannot explain the existence of the moral law within every person, which is the most convincing evidence for faith. Only faith can explain why people universally have a sense of right and wrong.

Compared to Collins, Dinesh D'Souza is definitely a bold apologist. Responding to the recent atheist manifestos by Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, D'Souza writes: "This is not a time for Christians to turn the other cheek. Rather it is a time to drive the money-changers out of the temple." In What's So Great About Christianity D'Souza seeks to equip comrades for battle, though at times the reader may wonder why D'Souza's help is needed, since according to him "God is the future, and atheism is on its way out."

If God is the future, that is no thanks to liberal Christianity, according to D'Souza. Liberal theologians are "the world's missionaries to the church," clamoring in behalf of women's rights and gay marriage. D'Souza dispatches liberals with H. Richard Niebuhr's famous summary of the tenets of liberal Christianity: "A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross." It's a great line, but D'Souza doesn't seem to realize that Niebuhr himself is the patron saint of generations of theological liberals. D'Souza is also a bit hazy on some basic facts. (Apparently intending to describe divisions in the Episcopal Church, he notes that "traditional Christians" from mainline denominations have aligned themselves with new structures in Ghana and the Ivory Coast. Surely he means Uganda and Rwanda.)

In D'Souza's world, only Christians care about combating famine or resisting genocide: "Most people in other cultures are unconcerned." He also asserts that "modern science is an invention of medieval Christianity, and the greatest breakthroughs in scientific reason have largely been the work of Christians." Never mind that Muslims carried the load of Western science for a millennium and that Jews have won more than their share of Nobel prizes. Even more troubling are such theological excurses as this: Jewish monotheism was "generally unthreatening to Roman paganism." (D'Souza apparently has not heard of the Jewish revolts of AD 70 and 135.)

For D'Souza, Christianity's genius was distilled into Immanuel Kant's philosophy and John Locke's politics. Christianity brought to the world moral norms that can be made universal, he says. He also contends that church teachings helped bring about Western laws seeking to prevent ill-advised concentrations of power. D'Souza's book makes no mention of the Trinity or the incarnation, which one might think fairly important to orthodox Christianity. His tool kit for faith is little more than a set of talking points for debating Hitchens.

Better works of apologetics are being written. One of them is Timothy Keller's The Reason for God. Keller is founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, a congregation of the Presbyterian Church in America. Though the church has many young professionals among its members, it is startlingly traditional. Keller assumes that young urbanites are up for serious conversations about faith. At one point in his ministry he would stick around after worship for an hour to take questions.

A striking contrast to D'Souza (who opens his book with an epigraph from Star Wars' Darth Vader: "I find your lack of faith disturbing"), Keller readily grants that there are obstacles to faith, and he can be unsparing in his critique of Christians. He admits that religion may fuel violence and that churchgoers may be weak people who need a crutch. He says the answer to religious and irreligious fanatics is a different kind of fanaticism: the world needs people who are "fanatically humble, sensitive, loving, empathetic, forgiving, understanding--as Christ was." Keller thinks that what makes Redeemer Presbyterian different is its love of "irony, charity, and humility."

Keller's version of traditional Reformed faith seems to be effective in Manhattan. John Calvin's insistence on the saving efficacy of Christ alone, apart from any human work, touches the souls of young achievers trying to climb the career ladder. One can imagine them paying attention when Keller proclaims, "Your career can't die for your sins." And he can grant Christians' failings precisely because, for him, Christians don't claim to be the best people: we claim to have the greatest Forgiver.

The book is not without its problems. Keller lets Christians off the hook a little too quickly for their sins. For some reason he blames the Crusades on Anglo-Saxon paganism, and he insists that the cross can't be used to support violence (of course, it often has been used that way). Like other apologists, he seems unwilling to grant that someone really can be an atheist deep down. In his chapter on proofs for God's existence, he argues that the reader already believes in God, even if she doesn't know it. He repeatedly claims--wrongly--that the critique of religious people as narrow and arrogant is inevitably no less narrow and arrogant itself.

But Keller is on target when he argues that those who oppose "absolute truth" often do so from their own position that at least implicitly claims absolute truth. And he often skillfully deploys theological moves that liberals may not have encountered--as when he says that believing in a God of judgment is actually a hedge against violence, since revenge can be left in God's hands, not human ones.

Lying somewhere between D'Souza's boldness and Keller's and Collins's humility is N. T. Wright and his book Simply Christian. The New Testament scholar draws on his scholarly resources to address apologetic questions. For example, he argues that Christianity can explain people's universal desire for spirituality, community and beauty. Wright commends Christianity for offering a true vision of justice that overcomes the clamoring for vengeance. He argues that people's quest for spirituality and community cannot be fulfilled by mere material and psychological means, because we were created for relationship with God and one another. At key points in the book, Wright shows that much of the way people understand the world stems from the presuppositions of modern and postmodern worldviews. Christianity provides a vision of the world as it is and where it is going that calls these presuppositions into question. By revealing the presuppositions of other worldviews, he is able to present a uniquely Christian vision of the world that is also persuasive.

Wright's title suggests that his book is an attempt to update C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, and the Anglican bishop of Durham does have something of Lewis's knack for producing an unforgettable image or phrase. He says those who make arguments for God's existence are like people who point a flashlight at the sun and run the risk of ending up like the women who went to Jesus' tomb--with a living God on their hands rather than a dead one. Wright also shows that Christianity need not be wed to conservative politics or doctrinal narrowness: on the cross the living God took on massive injustice, yet did not "lash out with threats or curses." For Wright, the bodily resurrection of Jesus serves God's work of "putting the world to rights." Caesars and pharisees of the religious right should shiver in their shoes at news of a living, embodied savior (while Gnostics of all types concentrate on some world other than this one). This is vintage Wright--clear, compelling, zeroing in on the problems in the church and world.

Yet compared to Lewis's work, the/book feels all too churchy. When Wright compares praying without a structure to mountaineering without shoes (it can be done, but by very few), it's a striking and helpful analogy--if one is already worried about how to pray. Wright reworks for popular consumption his scholarly investigations of the resurrection and the meaning of messiah in Jesus' day, but again these concerns are more relevant to Christians than to outsiders. The marvel of Lewis's book is that it can be handed to someone outside Christianity in the confidence that it will prompt a fresh look at the faith. Wright's writing is simply pitched a little too high.

Conservative apologists of old (and their current imitators, like Strobel) operated on the basis of evidentialism--the idea that we can and should believe only what can be supported by empirical evidence. Many conservative apologists today recognize that postmodernity has altered the terms of discussion. No longer is it obvious what constitutes evidence. A sign of this trend is InterVarsity Press's New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics, which has entries on many theologians and philosophers as well as on topics ranging from abortion to worldviews.

All the book's articles take the concerns of postmodernity and pluralism seriously, and the first 50 pages address the contemporary challenges of doing apologetics. The writers agree that apologetics in a post-Christian culture involves articulating basic theological tenets. Apologetics must contend for the uniqueness of Christianity, not simply the existence of a generic God or Designer. Rather than arguing for a Creator in general, Christian apologetics will argue for the trinitarian God revealed in Jesus Christ. And it will emphasize the importance of arguments that point to the uniquely Christian way of life.

The unique Christian vision must be judged according to the extent to which it accounts for the world. Judging between competing visions of the world is not the same as proving the truth of one or the other. Judgment requires knowing the issues intimately and making a well-informed decision. A courtroom judge must know the factual evidence of a case, the relevant laws and previous court decisions, and be able to discern the character of the persons involved. Likewise, apologists and their interlocutors must be wise in judging between competing accounts of the world.

Christians have always had to engage in apologetics--to give an account of the faith to those who inquire. In doing so, Christians inevitably reframe the faith for themselves. Done as it should be, apologetics renews the church as it reveals the plausibility and even the beauty of faith. Done poorly, it can turn off believers and unbelievers alike.

The postmodern insight is that there are always competing versions of what counts as rationality. Arguments about faith do not float free of cultural context or individual experience. Nor do the arguments considered here float free of individual stories: Collins, D'Souza, Keller and Wright are very different people who operate in different disciplines and social roles. Character precedes argument--something that Origen and the other patristic writers recognized. If Christianity is true, it creates faithful and generous-hearted people. If it isn't doing that, all arguments fail.

Learning to Pray

Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age,

Gods breath in man returning to his birth,

The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,

The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;

 

Engine against th’ Almightie, sinner’s towre,

Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,

The six daies world-transposing in an houre,

A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear;

 

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,

Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,

Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,

The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,

 

Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud, The land of spices, something understood.

 

George Herbert

 

Buried deep in the Norton Anthology, George Herbert's little poem with the unpretentious title "Prayer" is easy to miss. Decorously contained on a half-page with regular rhyme and punctuation, it seems at first glance to be the sort of poem a pious 17th-century country parson might be expected to write--a courteous reiteration of theological truths upon which the Sunday faithful may happily agree. But if your glance lingers a little longer, you will find yourself ambushed by metaphors that will not let you go until they bless you. Over 20 of them in 12 lines, every one offering a different way to think about what exactly we enter into when we pray.

Prayer is "the Churches banquet," an idea that brings together word and sacrament in a phrase: in prayer we get our nourishment for the journey; in the church with its rich liturgical legacy, that food for the soul is preserved and prepared. Prayer, another line claims, is "Gods breath in man returning to his birth"--our whispered petitions a movement as natural as the ebb tide drawn back to sea. Prayer takes the measure of all things as "the Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth." It is also, shockingly, an "engine against th'Almightie"--an armed tank coming at the divine adversary, who stands undaunted in its path. Every image opens an avenue of reflection on the mysterious business: prayer is music and manna and "the soul's blood," and finally, simply, "something understood." As metaphor is a means of understanding, so is prayer, though it defies rational analysis.

The range of Herbert's images offers some indication of how many ways there are to enter into prayer. We get some sense of that variety in the Psalms, where we learn how capacious is the conversation to which we are invited by an infinite God, who is inexplicably interested in our small selves. From the Psalms we learn praise and imprecation, lamentation and the deep lullaby that allows us to "lie down and sleep, for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety" (Ps. 4:8). Some psalms, like this one, bring us into direct address. Others turn us outward in proclamation, backward in commemoration or inward in reflection.

Given the range of forms, uses and attitudes of prayer, the poverty of a monochromatic prayer life seems tragic and wasteful: at the risk of sounding too pragmatic, prayer could be serving many more functions for most of us than we allow it to. Praying brings our attention to the fact that God is present, and makes the spot of ground on which we stand into holy ground. It quiets and focuses the mind; it clarifies intention; it awakens the imagination--a powerful tool of worship and compassion--it opens up the heart and even the lungs, as we breathe more deeply and slowly and relax into this most intimate of encounters. As a communal practice, praying creates consensus and convergence of focus, teaching us how to be the body of Christ, speaking, at least for one moment, with one voice and one hope.

In a world where power has become almost synonymous with violence and greed, the power of prayer is one of the church's best-kept open secrets. Christians who live where bombs fall in the streets and warlords bear weapons into the marketplace know the power of prayer more vividly and practically than most of us who know the securities of an affluent culture. People who know that prayer is the last resort may also teach us why it should be the first. Christians stand to learn a great deal not only from each other, crossing denominational lines with "generous orthodoxy," but also from those who pray in other traditions.

Philip and Carol Zaleski begin their book Prayer: A History with a startling survey of who prays and how:

a recovering alcoholic reciting the Serenity Prayer, a Catholic nun telling her beads, a child crossing himself before a meal, a quaking Shaker, a meditating yogini, a Huichol Indian chewing a peyote button, a Zen monk in satori, a Lubavitcher dancing with the Torah, Saint Francis receiving the stigmata, a bookie crossing his fingers before the final race, Ebenezer Scrooge pleading for just one more chance, dear God, just one more chance.

Their point is not simply to document or celebrate the variety of human invention, but to remind us, as Herbert did, how many are the avenues of grace that can lead us into the presence of God. Among those they cite are Tibetans who make prayer wheels from "cast-off plastic Pepsi-Cola bottles." This image itself is a kind of parable: our prayers rise up out of our dungheaps and landfills; the inclination toward the Creator survives even in the midst of the mess we have made of creation.

To look upon those prayer wheels not (as some of us were taught) as instruments of "vain repetition," but as outward and visible signs of the intention to pray without ceasing, can perhaps lead iconoclasts to more compassionate reflection on the sacramental impulse and on the place of objects--statues and stained glass and candles and altar cloths, beads, bouquets, and kneeling cushions in needlepoint stitched by some faithful woman as her own act of participation in the prayers of the church.

But even with those aids, prayer practices may lapse or become perfunctory. In those times, if we pray at all, the suspicion that we could be doing it better leads us back to the disciples' poignant petition, "Lord, teach us to pray." Help us "get it." Help us understand not only how to pray, but how to stay at it. Deepen for us the experience and the effects of prayer.

An answer to that petition came for me some years ago when a Quaker friend invited me to meet regularly with a small group to share prayer practices. When I asked her what had prompted her to bring us together, she said simply, "I want to learn how other people do it." Part of our purpose was to give one another permission to ask very nosy and practical questions about what "worked." Prayer that works, I learned, is prayer that yields clarity, or insight, or a course of action, or leaves you more accepting of uncertainty. It can work by opening your heart in spite of yourself, or by enabling you suddenly to imagine a point of view other than the one you've been clinging to. It can loosen your grip on all manner of cherished plans and problems. It can make you laugh--a laughter that brings both release and trust that indeed, "all shall be well."

One of the dimensions of prayer that bemused me then, and still does, is intercession. I am much more inclined by temperament and training toward contemplative practices that allow me to find silence and rest in God's presence. Intercession is strenuous. So I am fascinated by people who do it intentionally and consistently. When they offer to pray for me, they ask for specifics. They keep prayer lists. They want to know exactly how to focus their petitions--as though they're concerned about where to aim the laser beam. Their sense of prayer as service and intervention seems every bit as practical as a nurse's knowledge that caregiving requires practical understanding of the patient's condition. Effective intercessors know themselves to be bearers of something precious when they receive others' sorrow or hope or confusion and carry it into the presence of God. They go there in our stead. They pray when we can't. They make our business their business--surely one of the ways in which membership in the body of Christ sets us apart from a culture in which minding your own business has acquired the status of a virtue.

One friend for whom I promised to pray as his wife was dying said to me in a moment of spiritual exhaustion, "You pray. I can't. I'll just have to rely on others to pray for now." And so he did. His reply has stayed with me as an encouragement to pray for those unable or unwilling to pray for themselves, invoking the privilege we enjoy as members of one body to count for as well as count on each other in asking for what we need.

One of Jesus' most memorable directives about prayer is the simple mandate, "Ask and you shall receive." It is easy to forget the importance of asking, for two reasons: 1) God knows what we need, so asking can seem like pointless redundancy, and 2) asking doesn't obviate the necessity of planning and working to get our needs met. But of course neither objection is the point. Asking keeps us in relationship to the One who gives, aware of what comes to us, even apparently by our own efforts, as gift.

A little sentence that came to me in prayer has helped me learn to be less timid about asking and receiving: "Let yourself be blessed." This simple act of allowing is harder than it seems. I suspect I'm not alone in feeling conflicted about my blessings. I don't understand why I'm blessed in ways others aren't--with health, prosperity, pleasures, life itself, and so I fall easily into uneasy, free-floating guilt that dilutes gratitude. It is easy to confuse salutary self-denial with a spiritual parsimoniousness that mistakes all abnegation for virtue.

Throughout the Gospels we find evidence that our concern is to be with the concrete particulars of life. We are not to intellectualize in a way that removes our focus from the very practical concerns of tending the sick, caring for the vulnerable, participating in community life (like Calvin, who concerned himself with the sewage systems in Geneva) or voting, getting the car fixed, recycling old newspapers, making meals.

The call to deal in particulars extends to thanksgiving as well as petition. Thanksgiving seems such a simple matter--a spontaneous overflow of relief, or a habit of daily recognition that we continue to receive God's good gifts. Actually, thanksgiving is as much a discipline to be learned as any other form of prayer. It can carry us into places of great depth if we are willing to take seriously Paul's instruction to give thanks in everything. Thanksgiving, like confession, provides a needed corrective in a culture where rights are so central to the social contract. In the political order, there are few concepts as important as basic human rights, and our obligation to protect them, especially where they are being grossly violated, is a primary ethical concern. Still, a deeper truth is that we have what we have from the hand of the Lord, who "giveth and taketh away." Those terms are the terms not of the social contract, but of a covenant.

For many people the hardest thing about learning to pray is finding time, space, privacy, quiet and energy for prayer. Having been pathologically busy for too many years, I have taken great comfort in Wendell Berry's observation that "work done gratefully and well is prayer." It doesn't substitute for kneeling or sitting quietly and setting aside all other occupations. But it is what most of us can manage most of the time. Little injunctions along the way--"This is your work, Lord, guide me in doing it" or "Breathe in me, breath of God"; "Open my eyes as I walk through this day to see where your Spirit leads" or "God be in my ears and in my listening"--can reframe the most commonplace task and renew a sense of adventure and expectancy.

Public prayer is as needful for our spiritual health as private prayer. The purpose of the liturgy is to gather us and teach us how to be one in Christ. As we read the printed prayers aloud, even if one part of the mind wanders to matters of room temperature or buzzing flies, we align ourselves with the communion of saints and are lifted into a great wave of shared life. Perhaps, if we are attentive, we come to an awareness that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin articulated when he said, "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience."

The scattered, shattered body of Christ, shifting and rumbling in the many corners of this world, will not be united by means of conferences, declarations, exhortations or negotiations, though we must engage in those things to work out our salvation. Only in prayer and in the sharing of the Lord's Supper, which reminds us more vividly than anything else that we hold our very bodies in common and live in deep dependence on God and each other, can unity be broached.

Public prayer matters differently--and urgently-outside those sites of worship where it is acknowledged to be essential business. There still remain places and occasions when a designated person of faith is called upon to offer an invocation, a benediction, grace before a meal, a prayer of dedication for a new building or a blessing for a bike race. Curiously, such requests often come from people who retain little more than a vestigial sense of prayer as a ritual act that dignifies the occasion. But there is opportunity in public prayer to practice radical authenticity. To be asked to pray publicly is to be handed a flaming torch, not just a lapel microphone. Imagine offering in public the prayers the public most needs. Imagine being specific, both about our corporate sins and about the love that is "broader than the measures of the mind." A pastor I know begins many public prayers with simple statements of reaffirmation: "Gracious God, you are the One who loves us beyond what we can imagine" or "God, you are the One who forgives when no one else will" or "Loving God, from whom we receive all that we have."

We need those reminders to revise and reframe our assumptions about how to live. Georgia Harkness's Prayer and the Common Life, written over half a century ago, begins with a bold statement about the relevance of prayer to the urgencies of the historical moment: "Of all the things the world now desperately needs," she writes, "none is more needed than an upsurge of vital, God-centered, intelligently grounded prayer." She insists on an essentially theological view of the world as the only appropriate starting point for effective radical politics--the only way to maintain a right understanding of what we are about and to avoid partisanship in our efforts to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God.

The commitment to linking prayer with action comes with a cost: congregations struggle and split over activism. But those who stay through the tensions learn to accept uncertainties and conflicts as an incentive to deepen their questions. There need to be those who preach prophetically, speak boldly and act decisively. There need also to be those who conserve, bide their time and practice prudence. We need the Wal-Mart worker who depends on her job despite its poor benefits as well as the leader of the local movement to boycott the megachain for its labor abuses.

A comment that stays with me from many years ago, when I first encountered contemplative prayer on a visit to a Carmelite monastery, is a friend's observation that none of us can know how much of what God is doing in the world is brought about in response to the prayers of people we don't know and never see. Every day millions of faithful souls in monasteries and back pews and small apartments exercise the priesthood of all believers in prayer practices that bring life to the church as the beating heart brings blood to the body. Some spend their time in lectio divina, listening for the word or phrase in scripture that addresses the moment, finding in each word and image a trailhead, a trigger point, an invitation. Cynthia Bourgeault, in Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, writes of lectio that it "offers a simple but comprehensive practice of praying the scripture that leads gradually but steadily from the mind to the heart. … One takes the word of God deeper and deeper into oneself until finally it returns to the silence which is, as John of the Cross intimated, 'God's first language,' out of which both Word and words emerge."

That emergence takes an unpredictable course. Every worthwhile reflection on prayer comes back to these mysteries: that it works, but not to purposes we can predict or prescribe; that it can take place in the merest breath, the slightest turning, and below the level of awareness; that it is also a matter worthy of a lifetime of learning and experimentation; that it brings us into intimate encounter with the God who is Love; that it binds us together and teaches us how to be the body of Christ; that it also leads those from outside Christian tradition into divine encounter in ways we may learn from; and that it may be the least among us whose prayers open the windows through which the Spirit blows.

Nicholaes Maes's painting Old Woman at Prayer has hung on my wall for years as a reminder of the many who, hidden and unrecognized, summon God's power into the world through words faithfully uttered over the most daily concerns. She sits before a solitary meal, eyes closed and head inclined before a bowl of soup and a few loaves. An impatient cat pulls at the tablecloth, but she, apparently, will not be distracted. As George Eliot reminds us in the final lines of Middlemarch, we have no way of knowing what we owe "to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." We can, however, rest assured that no prayer is lost and that when we pray we are drawn into a vortex of power that is utterly unpredictable and the most secure place on earth.

 

Living by the Word  Rom. 14:1-12

The oneness of the church -- one Lord, one faith, one baptism -- is as integral to being a part of Christ’s body as receiving the sacrament of bread and wine. In Romans 14 Paul is writing to a broken body of people. The surface issues are about appropriate Christian eating practices, but the real issue is a pervasive self-righteousness, a sense that some in the church are harshly judging the discipleship of others. Labels such as strong and weak are being used as pious weaponry to put others in their place. The distinguishing marks of the church in Rome are not faith, hope and love, but verbal sparring, contempt and attacks leveled at others.

We live at a time when saber rattling is in vogue. Red states and blue states are squaring off in an election, while the blogosphere honors those who scream the loudest. Often the church reflects the wider culture and becomes another battleground where one person asserts superiority over another, or one group of Christians trashes something that’s important to another group. In Christian history, Christians have repeatedly chosen to leave the table of our Lord rather than abide in the brokenness of his body. Divide and conquer has replaced reform and renew, leading to an ecclesial marketplace that rivals the largest American shopping mall. Sometimes the Bible and tenets of the faith are forgotten as a means of peacemaking and reinvented as instruments of violence. The division is made more painful against the backdrop of Jesus’ prayer for oneness and Paul’s reminder that whether we live or die, together we belong to the Lord.

Paul’s letter attempts to rise above the fray, saying that what makes us indispensable to one another, and what distinguishes Christians from the wider world, is not what we eat, or our ability to win a theological debate, or our moral superiority, or the utility of our practices, but our baptism, our unity in the gospel which demands that we remain with one another precisely in those places where we disagree. Like a preacher massaging the edges of a three-point sermon, Paul gently reminds the Christians in Rome of the following themes: First, each Christian is a member of God’s household. If God has accepted this person, who is in a position to condemn? Second, Christian practices are all aimed at building up the body and serving God in Christ. What is done to honor God appropriately should not be condemned by others in the community. Third, each of us will have our day of judgment, and on that day it will be God, not our brothers and sisters in Christ, who will sit in the judgment seat.

However, there is another theme that Paul is working in this letter. He is subtly suggesting that places of friction and disagreement may in fact be the places that God is using to deepen our faith and love and bind us more closely together in Christ’s body. When I sin against a sister in Christ I have an opportunity to confess. When I am hurt by a brother in the faith I am given the opportunity to forgive. When I disagree with a member of the household of God I can be open to the Spirit’s working in new ways. The moment I start to feel a touch self-righteous is the time to pray all the more fervently for humility.

Just as we cannot choose which family we are born into, we cannot choose who God will call into Christ’s body in baptism. We do not have to like them. We do have to love them. The goal of being together in the body of Christ is not to agree or get along. The hope is to help one another become more Christlike, to love God and neighbor in ever more praising ways. The logic of grace in this sense points not toward winning, but toward holiness. The contours of grace are measures of freedom precisely in how we conduct ourselves in relationship to others. Like the rocky edges of a fault line that push and grind each other down while transforming each jagged edge into a new creation, disagreement, frustration and even anger present an opportunity for a sanctified life, for deeper unity in the body.

We stay with one another because that is what our Lord commands and because it is the only way to grow in the image and likeness of Christ. We are like partners in a marriage who hurt and betray each other and yet hold fast to their vows, confessing their sins, offering forgiveness, listening intently and praying for insight and compassion -- and in their togetherness over time discover a deepened life of joy and grace.

The world will not know us by our perfect harmony; it will know us by our love. By mimicking God’s choosing to be with us in Christ in the way that we choose to remain with others in the body, we become church and model the unity of the gospel.

Paul says that all of us will one day stand before the throne of grace, and on that day the questions will not be: Was your theology perfect? Did you point out the sins of others? Did you win the debate? Did you get the practices exactly right? Instead God will ask us: Did you love? Did you forgive? Did you encourage? Did you build up the body? Did you help others become holy? Did you help others serve God? Did you serve the one Lord, through the one baptism, in the one faith?

Living by the Word  Matt. 20:1-16

All day long a landowner has been going into the marketplace to hire workers for his vineyard and now only one group remains. The landowner says to the workers, “Why are you standing here idle all day?” They respond with one of the most painful lines in all of scripture: “Because no one has hired us.” The text does not say why they were not hired. Perhaps they did not have the needed skill set. Maybe they could not speak the language, lacked a proper education or were missing a green card. Maybe they could not afford the increase in gas prices and had to walk, or stayed home that morning with a sick child. Perhaps there simply were not enough jobs to go around. Whatever the reason, they were left out. Like the old man in a rowboat in New Orleans who kept going back into the flooded city, finding more and more people who needed to be rescued, Jesus says, this landowner desperately wants everyone to have a place in the vineyard. He cannot stomach the thought of anybody being left behind, so he says to the last unhired workers, “Go into the vineyard.”

When the landowner gives a full day’s wage to everybody no matter how long they’ve worked, who is more startled? Those who barely broke a sweat? Or those who gamely labored all day and now straighten their backs, wide-eyed in anticipation, thinking they will get more than the others? Surprise and anger overcome exhaustion in the latter group. “What kind of business owner are you? Don’t you know the basics of incentive and reward? We have sunburns, blisters and pulled muscles. We’ve kept this silly vineyard operating while you were in the marketplace. Not only do you pay us last but you pay us the same! We deserve better!” The landowner gently reminds them of their agreement, a day’s wages for a day’s work, and adds, “Can I not do what I choose with what belongs to me?”

Every sophomore in Econ 101 knows that this is no way to make a buck. This is bad business, fuzzy math and flat-out unfair. In the world we know, time plus effort equals production, and production equals pay. Those who are in the most demand, the hardest workers with the highest skills, deserve the first and greatest reward.

Yet this parable suggests that in the economy of God’s kingdom there is something better than profit margin, greater than incentive and reward, more beautiful than a sharply run business -- and that is abundant grace. The story is about a God who wants everyone inside the vineyard, who will not stop rushing out into the marketplace until all have been rounded up, who will not rest until the outsiders, the forgotten and the lonely have been included alongside the skilled, the timely and the hardworking, even if it costs God everything. In their jealousy and rage, those who labored in the vineyard all day long miss the blessing of the vineyard. They forgo an opportunity to make the acquaintance of the landlord and celebrate the harvest of grace.

Then another surprise: In the economy of God’s grace those who are hired at the very end, those whom no one else wants, are the closest to God’s heart. They are the first recipients of God’s generosity. In the economy of grace the last are placed first in line.

Remember when you were on the playground as a child and the captains squared off to choose teams? “I’ll take her. I’ve got him. I suppose you’ll do.” You sat watching the others get picked and wanted to wave your hand. “Pick me!” We’ve all been there. Nothing hurts more than feeling as if you have nothing to offer and are looking in from the outside.

We could think about this parable in terms of family life. All of us are somehow a part of a family, and we know that between siblings often there are tensions, with frustrations and pettiness visible to all. Yet parents want their children to feel included regardless of how the children deserve to be treated. The parents of an 18-year-old and an 11-year-old do not love the 18-year-old more because the older child has been in the family vineyard longer. God does not delight in the marriage of two 25-year-olds more than in the marriage of two 65-year-olds simply because the younger couple may have a longer time together. Time plus effort does not translate into just reward in the economy of God’s kingdom. Like love, grace does not depend on the worthiness of the one receiving it.

To the unhired workers in the city square, to those who have been forgotten, to all who for whatever reason have been left behind, to all who are crying, “Pick me! Pick me!” God in Jesus Christ responds, “You’re hired. Come into the kingdom vineyard and take your place at the front of the line.”

Dust and Ashes

Book Review:

Job (Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary). By Samuel E. Balentine. Smyth & Helwys, 714 pp.

 

The book of Job is one of the most beautiful and perplexing books of the Bible. G. K. Chesterton said, "The Iliad is great because all of life is a battle; the Odyssey is great because all of life is a journey; the Book of Job is great because all of life is a riddle." Thomas Carlyle wrote, "A Noble Book; all men's Book! It is our first, oldest statement of the never-ending Problem--man's destiny, and God's ways with him here on this earth." John Calvin, while rejecting Job's challenge to God, preached 159 sermons on the book in a single year.

Yet there has been sweeping disagreement over what the book says. Virtually every verse in the book--including some of the most decisive ones--has been subjected to scholarly debate. Some exegetes conclude that whole sections, including the prologue and epilogue, are add-ons by scribes eager to temper Job's brusque vilification of God. Others see the so-called Wisdom section (chapter 28) as totally unrelated to the original text. A majority of interpreters view the lengthy intervention by Elihu as an annoying addendum. In recent years scholars like Carol Newsom, Norman Habel, Edwin Good and Robert Gordis--to mention only a tiny fraction--have made splendid contributions to unraveling Job's mysteries. Given this volume of scholarship, it might be asked whether there's anything more to say about Job.

Samuel Balentine, professor of Old Testament at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, crafts powerful and imaginative understandings of some of the most central--and controversial--matters of the book's theology. Walter Brueggemann, author of The Theology of the Old Testament, calls Balentine's achievement breathtaking: "There is not a page of this commentary on which I was not led, in generative ways, to where I had not previously been."

Among the most salient points is Balentine's forthright analysis of the stunning revelation by God (Job 2:3) that he entered the capricious wager with Satan "for no reason." God's often overlooked (or intentionally ignored) revelation is compounded by his remark to Satan in the same verse that he put Job, who is "blameless and without sin," through hell because "you incited me against him." Balentine is clearly deeply distressed at this passage, and his thorough analysis of it (he refers to it 74 times) contrasts markedly with most commentators' failure even to mention the passage.

Balentine concedes the inescapable conclusion: even though Job's three friends argue passionately throughout on God's behalf for the traditional doctrine of retributive justice, the entire book is a repudiation of that doctrine. It describes God's seemingly unjust and capricious treatment of the sinless Job, of whom God says early on, "There is no one like him on earth" (1:8).

Given that Job, unlike Adam, is free of sin, Balentine concludes, "The presumptive causal connection between sin and misfortune does not apply in his case." Balentine describes this as the problem of the book. The answer to the entire theodicy issue is simply that the connection between righteousness and suffering cannot be established.

Balentine is sensitive to the fact that even though the ways of God are incomprehensible to humans, the doctrinal thunderbolt "for no reason" raises enormous obstacles for Christians. God's horrific, undeserved treatment of Job--who of course knows nothing of the wager--raises fundamental questions about the nature of God. God's affliction of Job leaves humankind "to wonder if God can be trusted." Humankind--and that is who Job represents--is "left more vexed than satisfied." And then the ultimate question: "Even if Job has passed God's test for fidelity, we must wonder if God has not failed Job's test for what is required for God." Balentine offers no rationale for God's action. The book of Job, he writes, "asks us to think about possibilities that conventional expectations may long since have discarded."

Balentine's candid analysis of the character of God continues in his extensive treatment of fear as a factor in the human relationship to God. Balentine cites multiple entries on Job's love of God, but just as many on fear. "'Fearing God' and 'turning from evil' are the virtues that define Job's prologue piety (1:1, 8; 2:3)." Phrases not unlike those used by the angel in describing Abraham in Genesis (22:12) occur repeatedly throughout the book, especially in the focus on God's awesome power (9:5-7), which Job perceives to be "destructive and brutal.… He senses that God's power is motivated by Anger." Job divulges that even before his affliction, during the golden years of his prosperity, he feared disaster. His affliction: "Every terror that haunted me has caught up with me, and all that I feared has come upon me" (3:25). Balentine writes, "It looks like one who lives in persistent 'fear' and 'dread' (v. 25) as S. Michell has put it, like one 'whose nightmares have come to life.' In the end, it looks like one whose life is defined completely by negatives and absences: there is unease, no 'quiet,' no 'rest.' There is only turmoil (v. 26). The only place where this terror will cease, as Job has already discerned, is in Sheol--and even the hope for Sheol is vain."

Balentine also examines Satan's charge that Job loves God only because God has provided well for him. "Has not Job good reason to be God-fearing?" Satan asks sarcastically, "Have you not hedged him round on every side with your protection, him and his family and all his possessions?" (l:9-10b). This extraordinarily provocative question goes unanswered (except that in the epilogue Job is indeed recompensed "twice as much as he had before" for his loyalty--which would seem to confirm Satan's charge).

Balentine's commentary is further distinguished by his efforts to take seriously the speeches of Job's three "friends," and especially the interloper, Elihu. He's aware that the friends are widely dismissed as parroting doctrinal generalities. Although he concedes that Elihu is almost certainly an add-on ("a measure of comic relief, [who] offers an easing of tensions that may be compared to the roles of the alazon or buffoon in classical Greek comedy"), Balentine makes a determined effort to probe his arguments. After all, he points out, the angry young Elihu speaks more uninterrupted lines (1.59) in the book than anybody else except God.

Elihu (whose speeches were discovered in the caves at Qumran) not only presents himself as a critic of the three friends, but he has the effrontery to offer his views as if they came from God himself. Overlooking the bombast, Balentine, while acknowledging that Elihu's discourse "increases, rather than diminishes," the tensions of the book, still finds merit in Elihu's explanation of Job's suffering: the real answer to suffering is human pride. "God uses dreams and visions to warn people like Job against the disposition to be proud. If they do not understand the first message, then God will try to get their attention by a second, and decidedly more painful, means of communication."

Traditionally the great Jewish sin was for a person to try to subvert the gap between God and humankind. Elihu is angry with Job "not because he has cried out in his suffering, but because he has cried out against God." In Elihu's world, challenging God is unthinkable. Balentine emphasizes that Job doesn't listen to Elihu.

Still, Balentine senses in Elihu more than mere anger at Job. He bases this on a conviction of the universality of suffering--that "with so much suffering in this world, it is little wonder that most, if not all persons, feel themselves to be only spectators." He suggests that for all his bluster, Elihu recognizes that his own well-being "is informed and defined by collective values that have a direct bearing on how every individual lives." In a word, Elihu is far from being as self-confident as his nonstop barrage of Job suggests. Balentine quotes with strong approval Martha Nussbaum: "Blame is a valuable antidote to helplessness."

Balentine again goes his singular way by finding in God's two "whirlwind" speeches a much more upbeat interpretation than do most scholars, who generally deprecate the speeches as a denial of humankind's right to question God. Surely God's "gird thy loins" is hardly an invitation for a friendly conversation.

Balentine sees in God's theophany speeches an effort to reach out and embrace Job. Job is not challenging God, but only asking for justice and an understanding of suffering. Balentine argues that the speeches show that God "takes extraordinary measures" to discuss with Job "the intricate details of creation's day-to-day rhythms." Balentine finds in God's insistence that Job speak up evidence that God's design of the world "requires more than one voice. What God has to say is not complete until Job adds his words." God is encouraging Job to speak up. "If we have sympathy for Job, we will be looking for signs that his quest for comfort and consolation is important to God." Balentine takes every opportunity to search out textual nuances which suggest that God is actually patting Job on the back. In rebuttal, it might be pointed out that Elihu was motivated by anger and showed no concern for Job's state.

A verse of paramount importance to Job--and equally so for Christian doctrine--is 42:6: "Therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes" (NRSV). Balentine notes that there are no fewer than five translations that "deserve consideration as legitimate possibilities." In reality, there are dozens more, including:

Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes. (King James)

Wherefore I abhor my words, and repent, seeing I am dust and ashes. (Jewish Publication Tanach)

Therefore I will be quiet, comforted that I am dust. (Steven Mitchell)

Abhor "myself" or abhor "my words"--there is a significant difference. And "I will be quiet" suggests there is no recanting. Under the circumstances, how can any claim be made regarding what "truth" Job speaks, except that "dust and ashes" describes the mortal condition?

"Textual ambiguities also make it clear … that whatever Job's last words may mean, they convey anything but a simple confession of sin," Balentine writes. He agrees, however, that Job's experience leads him to conclude that he has been consigned to live in a world where he cries out to a cruel God who doesn't answer. After the whirlwind, Balentine argues, "God's disclosure invites a transformation in Job's understanding about what it means to be 'dust and ashes.'"

Balentine concludes with a defense of Job--and God: "The lesson for Job seems to be that those who dare to stand before their maker with exceptional strength, proud prerogatives, and fierce trust come as near to realizing God's primordial design for life in this world as it is humanly possible to do."

Balentine gives special attention to creation imagery--the cosmic setting against which Job's entire ordeal with suffering takes place. Creation images are common throughout the Hebrew Bible, and Balentine underscores the "role of creation imagery in Job's situation." "Presumably God's objective is to say something that connects with Job's own covenantal instincts, something that enlarges, modifies, and/or corrects his understanding of how to respond rightly to misfortune." Here, however, Job faces a contradiction between the friends' argument that a covenantal relationship is "defined by humility and passive acceptance of the misfortunes God may use to discipline him," and God's approbation of Job for his other covenantal virtues, "including strong words and fierce resistance."

What's clear to God certainly isn't clear to Job. Thrust into the malevolent hands of Satan, Job begins, with good reason, to doubt the ways of God. Almost immediately (chapter 3) Job's sanguine relationship with God disintegrates. "Job begins to address God as the enemy who wages an unjust war against him." He believes God wants to destroy him, and he begins to talk back. For 38-odd chapters Job describes to God, in terms bordering on (and perhaps entering) the realm of blasphemy, the realities of human existence on earth. "In the prologue, it is Job who is on trial. Now Job reverses the charges. When God assaults the innocent without reason, it is divine justice, not human fidelity, which must be put on trial," writes Balentine.

Job demands justice from God. Humankind's problem is how to bring charges "against an adversary who will not be bound by reason or logic." Even though he realizes that he risks death, Job is prepared to take an oath--a profound step in the Hebraic context. "Between Job and his friends it is easy to side with Job," writes Balentine, but "between God and Job where should we take our stand?"

"When it comes to 'suffering for no reason,'" the book of Job "seems intent on reminding us that questions about the world, human existence, and God necessarily remain open." To some extent this is a book about wisdom: "But where shall wisdom be found?" Job asks. "And where is the place of understanding?" (28:12). But the wisdom is that "mortals do not know.… God knows" (28:12, 23). "Whenever someone proposes to explain suffering by saying it is simple as one, two, three," says Balentine, "the only thing the numbers will likely add up to is a zero. Statements about a truth falsely conceived can claim at most to be only half-truths."

Balentine's Job comes with an array of superb prints and engravings and a wealth of stimulating references to literature, drama and music on an accompanying CD. It is a classic against which other commentaries will be measured for a long time.

 

Great Debates

Book Review:

Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America. By Alien C. Guelzo. Simon & Schuster, 416 pp.

During the third debate of the 2000 presidential election, then-vice president Al Gore stepped away from his podium and wandered over to George W. Bush's side of the stage while Bush was answering a question. Observers were perplexed. Was Gore attempting to establish an alpha-male persona? Trying to rattle Bush by intruding on his personal space? Simply aiming to connect with the live audience and inject some excitement into a rather staid event? Whatever Gore had in mind, his behavior remained puzzlingly ambiguous.

No such ambiguity surrounded Stephen Douglas's performance during his fifth debate with Abraham Lincoln, held in Galesburg, Illinois. An observer noted that Douglas "shook his fist in wrath as he walked the platform. A white foam gathered upon his lips, giving him a look of ferocity." But Douglas went even further, as Allen Guelzo tells us in his magnificent account of the debates. The candidate approached Lincoln, accusing him of questioning his integrity. "'Does Mr. Lincoln wish to push these things to the point of personal difficulties here?' Douglas demanded, backing around and shaking his clenched fist within a few inches of Lincoln's face."

This month marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the Lincoln-Douglas debates (in honor of the occasion, the University of Illinois Press has just published a definitive edition of the texts of debates), and 2009 will mark the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth. Perhaps no scholar is better suited to the task of helping us celebrate and make sense of these anniversaries than Guelzo. A professor at Gettysburg College, Guelzo is one of the foremost interpreters of Lincoln's life and legacy. His 2002 biography, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, explored the intellectual foundations of the 16th president's political worldview and presented Lincoln not only as a gifted orator but as a penetrating thinker. Four years later, Guelzo's Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation explored this most puzzling of documents--described by historian Richard Hofstadter as possessing "all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading"--and found a powerful engine of American liberty worthy of careful consideration. (The latter volume is part of a broader corpus of books on Lincoln, initiated by Garry Wills's Lincoln at Gettysburg, that focus on a single speech or historical moment. It is profitably read alongside Gabor Boritt's The Gettysburg Gospel, Harold Holzer's Lincoln at Cooper Union and Ronald C. White's Lincoln's Greatest Speech.)

With this book, Guelzo turns to the decade before Lincoln's run for the presidency and takes his readers on an in-depth tour of the 1858 campaign, which made Lincoln a household name in the East and paved the way for his emergence as an unlikely candidate for the Republican nomination two years later.

Lincoln and Douglas opens a new window on this phase of Lincoln's life and career. Guelzo emphasizes the debaters' roots in 19th-century American politics and culture and highlights the stark differences in their political philosophy, personal style--and physical appearance: Douglas's "stumpy legs and paunchy torso," Guelzo writes, "made him look like Humpty Dumpty in a toupee, while Lincoln's height was largely in his legs and gave audiences the impression of a scarecrow come to life." Detailed maps allow readers to trace the candidates' travels, and grids trace the various charges, countercharges and threads of argument back and forth between the two candidates in each debate. (The grids are helpful for reading the debates as written texts, but it is less clear whether they capture the rhetorical and theatrical elements of the Lincoln-Douglas confrontations.)

Guelzo's eye for telling details is on full display, as in this account of the second debate, in Freeport, Illinois:

A small boy wiggled up onto the platform and unself-consciously hopped onto Douglas's lap, then traded places for Lincoln's lap when it was Douglas's turn to speak. (Half a century later, the boy, Thomas R. Marshall, would be the vice president of the United States.)

Of course, Lincoln and Douglas were arguing not merely over who should represent Illinois in the U.S. Senate, but over which candidate best represented the legacy of the nation's founders and offered the best prospect for preserving the Union and resolving the conflict over slavery. Douglas's emphasis on "popular sovereignty" elevated process over substance. As he put it, he did not particularly care whether slavery was voted up or down. His position leaned heavily on the argument that--Lincoln's incendiary rhetoric about a "house divided" notwithstanding--the founders had fully endorsed a nation that was half slave and half flee. If they had wanted to eliminate slavery or seek racial equality, they would have spelled out this position clearly. "This Government was made by our fathers on the white basis," Douglas argued at the Galesburg debate, "by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever." Fidelity to the founders' legacy involved ensuring that the Union continued to shower its benefits on whites and opposing the inflammatory rhetoric of abolitionists and others who espoused airy and troublesome notions of liberty.

Lincoln, on the other hand, understood the American nation as "conceived in liberty" (as he would later put it on the Gettysburg battlefield) and dedicated to an abstract proposition: that all men are created equal. He hastened to point out (in crude language during some of the earlier debates; with more charity in the final debate in Alton) that this did not mean that everyone should be treated equally in all ways immediately, but that black and white Americans were both deserving of the natural rights elaborated in the Declaration of Independence. As he said in Alton:

I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not mean to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all men were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what they did consider all men created equal--equal in certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.… They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, or yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.

They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all--constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even, though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, of all colors, everywhere.

Lincoln's claim that the nation could not continue half slave and half free rested both on his argument that the founders tolerated the existence of slavery while intending its eventual demise and on his political understanding of the strength of the slave system, which had shown a voracious appetite for power and the ability to corrupt the political process in pursuit of that power. (Methodist bishop Gilbert Haven had likened the slave power to an anaconda, squeezing the nation in its deathly grip.) For Lincoln, developing a political vision in line with the views of the founders would require repudiating this tolerance of slavery and moving away from concrete practices of the founders' time in service of their larger vision of liberty.

Guelzo sheds the most light on the debates when he emphasizes that they should be seen not as seven discrete events but as part of the candidates' larger campaigns. We often forget just how long a shadow Douglas cast over antebellum American politics. The debates themselves were hardly Lincoln's idea; they were forced on the unwilling candidate by Illinois's Republican state committee, whose members were unimpressed with his earlier strategy of following Douglas around the state and delivering speeches in his wake. Guelzo evokes the boisterous and rowdy nature of the debates; the taunts and hecklers that each candidate had to contend with; the political geography of Illinois, where racial politics tweaked the arguments of the debates in various ways; the partisan processions that escorted the candidates into the debate towns; the shifts in the weather; Douglas's increasingly problematic drinking as the debates wore on; the ways that Lincoln and Douglas spawned imitators across the country; and the details of the election and the system of representation that gave Douglas the victory while Lincoln arguably had more popular support.

Douglas and Lincoln were not through with each other after Election Day. Douglas's presidential ambitions fell apart as his party splintered. Guelzo recounts that on Inauguration Day 1861, "when Lincoln rose to take the oath and discovered that he had no place to rest his top hat, Douglas obligingly stepped forward and held it for him." Douglas accompanied Mary Todd Lincoln (whom he had courted, years earlier, in Springfield) to Lincoln's inaugural ball. Later that spring, just a week before his death, Douglas told an audience in Chicago that he contemplated the prospect of civil war with "a sad heart… with a grief that I have never before experienced."

Lincoln and Douglas, Guelzo helps us see, were both great Americans, and together they embodied the nation's complicated identity, its hopes and fears, its youthful self-confidence and its deep divisions, and its stubborn faith in itself. Their debates are part of a larger debate that the nation has been having with itself since its founding documents were drafted: Is democracy primarily a matter of vote counting, or is there something more fundamental, a moral core that gives the whole enterprise meaning and imbues it with purpose? As Guelzo concludes in his epilogue, it is a debate that Americans have never quite settled.

 

Living by the Word  Rom. 12:9-21

Like an artist sketching in broad strokes on a huge canvas, Paul in the first 11 chapters of Romans has traced with great intensity God's patience and persistence at making peace with humanity. The strokes get broader, the colors ever more vivid, until Paul is himself overcome at what he sees. He steps back, exhilarated at how even his attempt to trace the ways of God falls far short of the inventiveness and unpredictability of God's grace, and he breaks into doxology (11:33-36). All he or any of us can do in response to such grace is to worship.

What kind of worship? Because of God's mercies, the only worship that makes sense (logikhn is inexplicably translated as "spiritual" by the NRSV and NIV) is, in Paul's view, to offer our very lives, our bodies--our physical being, our imagination, our skills, our possessions--as a "living sacrifice." Such sacrificial worship is finally not a matter of obligation, but of gratitude and freedom. That is why in the following verses, including those assigned in this week's lectionary, we find not a set of rules but something like a locker-room pep talk: a grab bag of motivational prods, pushes and invitations.

I played soccer in college for one season, and I wasn't very good. (Forty-five years later I still remember blowing the one chance I had to score.) But I know that what a coach does before a game is to put some wind in the sails of the players. Tone matters as much as anything. A good coach wants to motivate, energize, pump up the team, make the players hungry to play well with joy rather than out of obligation and fear. That is what Paul is up to here. He wants his readers to remember who they are and what and (especially) who got them where they are--who the Source of their strength is.

Not Surprisingly, this pep talk to the "body in Christ" (12:5; not a bad name for a team!) is full of energy. For example, in verse 8, Paul speaks, of practicing mercy "with hilarity" (or "cheerfulness" in many translations). Maybe hilarious was used a little differently in Paul's day, but it clearly suggests a joyful and ungrudging offer of mercy. Baffling attitude, don't you think?

That passion infuses the following verses too. Verse 9: Don't just be critical of evil, hate it! Hate violence, poverty, sexism and greed. Hate callousness toward the environment. But don't just hate. Hold fast to the good. This is hardly an ordinary "being good." Paul's choice of language evokes the way a man and woman hold fast to each other.

Verse 10: Be fiercely competitive at honoring each other. No room here for limelight-hogging stars. Think of it as a special honor to hang out with those who are not flashy, who are on a losing streak, who, like me, flubbed their one chance at scoring, who would normally be thought of as an embarrassment to the team. As Paul says in another letter: "Not many of you were wise by human standards,…powerful,… of noble birth" (1 Cor. 1:26). That stock theme in Disney sports movies of losers and misfits being forged together into an unlikely winning team owes something to Paul. If in our day this theme is in some tension with a star system in sports and much of the arena of our common life, it was even more out of step with Roman imperial status-seeking in Paul's day.

The energy in the language seems to flag somewhat in verse 13, where the NRSV has the phrase "extend hospitality to strangers." That is not the way a coach talks at halftime, and it is not how Paul would have been heard. For one thing, "extend" or "practice" (NIV) does not begin to capture the force of the verb diwkontes, translated in verse 14 as "persecute": "Bless those who persecute you!" Further, the term behind "hospitality" is philoxenia ("love of strangers"). We know well the term xenophobia ("fear of strangers"). Regrettably, philoxenia has not made its way into our vocabulary.

Verses 13 and 14 thus contain a delicious play on words. Back to our sports analogy: not only am I to invoke the very best for those who are pursuing me in order to take me out of the game, I am with equal tenacity to pursue them with love. Think of what preoccupies us today: elections, "illegal aliens," terrorists, war. What would happen if those who had experienced God's loving pursuit of strangers, sinners and enemies (Rom. 5) were to pursue strangers, aliens and the hostile "other" with precisely such sly and persistent love? We recall the pioneer of this counterintuitive way of playing the game: When someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other. If members of Christ's body do their job, they can add a rather strange beatitude to blessed are the peacemakers and the persecuted: "Blessed are the persecutors!"

Oh, and leave the penalties to the Chief Referee (v. 19). Remember, that Ump is the very one who modeled this subversive way of playing and winning to begin with.

In these verses Paul asks his team to go out there and subvert the game and surprise the opposition by not hogging the ball, by refusing to retaliate--indeed, by helping out the opposition. Sounds like an order from the coach to throw the game. Not so. That's how you win! You never know--you might change the way the game is played, and you might have opponents wanting to join your crazy team.