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Mutant Ministry (Jonah 3;1-5; I Cor. 7:29-31; Ps. 62-5-12)

My erstwhile human encounters with the divine word are fraught with irony. The Bible is full of examples: Balaam’s talking ass; the promise of a patriarchal heir so long overdue that the child is named for the ensuing hilarity; the virtuous foreign woman deemed to be worth seven times the family-redeeming child she bears for her mother-in-law; the messianic savior born in a hovel and killed like a common criminal.

The mutant ministry of the prophet Jonah is another case in point. So familiar are the details of this entertaining story that a brief summary will suffice to set the scene. The Prophet of the Lord (PL) is commissioned to warn the Most Evil Empire (MEE) of its impending destruction. The PL flees by boat in the opposite direction. An act of God on the high seas threatens to destroy the ship and all aboard. Phoenician sailors, more deeply religious than the PL, determine who is to blame for the predicament and what to do about it. Despite their reluctance to risk the loss of life (wink, wink), the Phoenician sailors toss the PL into the sea. The PL is promptly swallowed by a large marine creature. From the belly of the whalelike fish, the PL delivers himself of a prayer so lousy with pious platitudes that the poor sea creature pukes him up onto dry land.

Our text begins with a prophetic recall and recommissioning. This time it’s off to the MEE. In the midst of the great city the recalcitrant PL unleashes a five-word oracle whose brevity is matched only by its banality: Forty days and you’re toast! (Jonah 3:4, paraphrased). And yet in this exquisite farce, the response far exceeds that of modern, urban, evangelistic crusades among the well churched. The evil people of the MEE believe in God and exhibit a repentance so robust that a fast is proclaimed and all are clothed in sackcloth from king to cattle.

God’s response is predictable. The whole judgment thing is called off. But the FL is not pleased. His hatred of Nineveh is greater than God’s mercy This is exactly why he had fled in the first place. He wanted no part in the deliverance of the ME E. By the end of the story the PL may or may not have accepted the counterintuitive morality so prevalent throughout the Bible: Samaritans can be good neighbors; stutterers can be lawgivers; theophanies are likely to be encountered in the still, small voice; and not even Nineveh is beyond God’s compassion.

This unique prophetic book provokes one to imagine that someone was goofin’ with the gullible. Here is prophetic minimalism gone amok. Jonah is portrayed as the moral equivalent of a cliché, the misanthrope in a sandwich board that says "The End Is Near." But perhaps the key lies not in the content of the Oracle but in the context of its delivery. The inherent warning of Jonah’s oracle is muted in the text. Instead what emerges is a great city paradigmatically pregnant with evil, and rushing toward ruin -- or redemption.

A parallel dynamic can be seen in the temporal framework of Paul’s ethic. The Corinthians want answers to their questions. How should they live? Paul gives some instructions intended to carry apostolic freight. He wants them to "stay as they are," with some concessions. His rationale is the "impending crisis." The culmination of an appointed time (kairos) that is just around the corner. From now on they are to live "as if" and "as if not," since the present form of the world is passing away It’s nothing less than the end of the world as they know it. For Paul, the impending wrap-up of history is so vivid that it infuses all current questions, problems, dilemmas and challenges. If indeed the present form of the world is passing, he seems to reason, why waste energy on lesser orders of concern, such as slavery and sex? These eschatological convictions have shaped Paul’s mission and his priorities.

When we hear this kind of imagery bandied about today we think of doomsday cults, survivalist bunkers and other forms of spiritual excess. But could it not also be used to describe our experience of the modern world? A world seemingly being remade with every passing day. A world less predictable, less comprehensible, in a constant state of flux. In nature and culture, present forms are becoming extinct. Our culture lurches, groaning, toward ruin -- or redemption. Something new is coming that we can’t quite see. But we feel ourselves at a threshold.

The putative catharsis of the Y2K phenomenon was symptomatic of this elongated almostness-but-not-quiteness of Christian hope. Paul’s perspective suggests that we, like the Corinthians. learn to live as if the preoccupations of the present world were not preeminent. To live as if the inevitability and reality of the new order were already transforming the way we live. It is something short of a realized eschatology, perhaps. Nonetheless, even before it arrives, the new thing is forming us, rearranging our priorities.

From the psalmist’s perspective, more metaphysical than temporal, priorities are also realigned by God’s omnipotence. Low estate an(1 high estate, considerations so crucial in earthly terms, are lighter than a breath in the cosmic balance. To confess that power and lovingkindness belong to God is to relieve ourselves of a significant existential burden, and also to accept an ethical mandate. For the Bible insists that we bear responsibility for the way we live. This principle appears over and over again in scripture, from the law to the prophets to the Lord’s Prayer. Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. Bounded by God’s justice and God’s mercy, there is this moral universe in which we move and breath and have our being.

Call Me (Deut. (18:15-20; Ps. 111; I Cor. 8:1-13)

I don’t carry a beeper or a cell phone. The services of’ professional biblical scholars rarely require that level of immediate access. No emergency calls to interpret an obscure passage. No rushing to the scene of a textual corruption. Yet it could happen. We are rapidly becoming a society "on call." Technology provides us with a constant flow of information. "Call me," our equipment says. "I’m here." So why not Semitic philologists on call. "Hello? Yes, I see. Let me just grab my triconsonantal root extractor and I’ll be right there!"

In the midst of all this calling, how do we recognize God’s voice calling us? Long ago, even before the rotary phone, the boy Samuel faced a similar dilemma. Calls from Yahweh were rare. But as a child pledged to service in the temple of Yahweh at Shiloh, Samuel was called by name at all times of day and night. On one particular night, the boy hears his name called, and responds, "Hello? Yes? Here I am. What do you want ?"

If you’re Eli, you’re not sleeping that well when the boy comes trotting in to disturb you with his nonsense. Now even the pretense of slumber is gone; it’s just you and your premonitions, a vague sense of doom hanging over you, and the Lord silent as only the Lord can be silent. Prophets wouldn’t know a vision anymore if it bit them in the behind. So what’s eating the kid? Indigestion? Fleas? Those worthless, carousing sons of yours? No, that boy is sharp. Maybe this is one of those rare cases of a divine call. If it happens again, you’d better instruct the boy how to respond. Just in case.

If you’re Samuel, you think it must be the old man. But the temple lamp hasn’t even burned out yet, too early for him to be calling for the vessel. He says he didn’t call? What? You suspect his eyesight isn’t the only thing fading fast. Then there it is again. And again he denies calling you.

This episode is framed by two oracles: the priestly house of Eli is about to fall because of corruption, and a new priest, this Samuel, will be consecrated in his place. The house of this new priest will eventually also fail the test of faithful succession. But for now Eli provides the guidance Samuel needs to hear the call. This role of mentor, facilitator and arbiter of God’s call is crucial to the story. He encourages and instructs Samuel to listen and tells him what to say, then forces the reluctant youth to articulate the message, even though it presages his own doom.

In our day, the word of the Lord is cheap, visions are widespread and telemarketers call us by name. How do we distinguish God’s call? Who will play Eli for us and reorient our attention so that we become able receptors of the divine vocation? Can we discern when the tossings and turnings and confusions of the young are actually unrecognized, unarticulated vocations? Are we providing them with the disciplines of heart and mind to listen and to act? Consider Samantha, who hears a call. Imagine Eli saying, "No, it can’t be a call to pastoral ministry. You must be mistaken. Go back, teach, write, nurture. That’s your vocation."

The calling of Nathanael is less direct -- mediated by Philip in the form of an enthusiastic invitation to follow the One from Nazareth. But Nathanael knows Nazareth. Nazareth is Nowhere. Nazareth is Nothing. A Nazarean is a Nobody. A Nichtsnutz.

When I was a kid, the label "made in Japan" signified a cheap trinket that cost little and was worth even less. It was a common term of derision applicable to any product shoddily made or easily broken. But by the time I was in college, the reputation of Japanese technology and workmanship was already being transformed. Now "made in Japan" signifies quality and reliability in a whole range of products.

Nathanael’s assumptions about the impossibility of a divine call from Nazareth had to undergo similar transformation. This time Philip is the catalyst who overcomes Nathanael’s categoric dismissal: Come and see! Venit. Vidit. Variatus est. Nathanael came, saw and was changed in an encounter made possible by a Philipian invitation and a Philipian coax.

A sense of calling represents a step toward greater self-awareness. To become aware of a call is to be aware of oneself in a new way, as the psalmist was aware: You know me, O Lord. You’ve done the research. You’ve read my file. Through the call I know myself as someone known; my life as something comprehended from beginning to end; my days as already written in that book "when none of them as yet existed." This is no recipe for fatalistic determinism, but rather a profound metaphor providing a way out of the modern dilemma. In the place of an alienated self at the center of an arbitrary, amoral universe, or a postmodern ghost trying to conjure up its name through myriad manipulations, we choose to live as those known and called by name.

Of course, every call to something may also be a call away from something. The call that led me to graduate studies coincided with an awareness that teaching high school was not my vocation. This message was brought home in an episode that was tantamount to an out-of-the-body experience. At the end of another exasperating day I found myself looking down from a vantage point somewhere near the ceiling of my small classroom at a guy wearing my clothes who was vigorously admonishing a hapless student sitting near the back of the Bible class. Watching the event unfold from this neutral perspective worked as an epiphany The writing on the wall was ominous but also strangely comforting: MENE, MENE, TEKEL. I was off to seminary.

Miracle Market (2 Kings 5:1-14, Mark 1:40-45)

There is an odd reticence about the healings in the lessons for this Sunday -- there’s an expectation of big-bang pyrotechnics, followed by a matter-of-factness in the healings that seems to disappoint. The haughty Naaman is downright offended by the simplicity of Elisha’s prescription for curing his leprosy. I thought he would surely come out to me, and stand, and call on the name of the Lord his God, and wave his hand over the place . .

But nothing that glamorous is planned: Naaman should just go and wash himself in the river. The river! As if he hadn’t tried washing before. As if the river Jordan were somehow a better river than the great rivers of Syria, his own country. Naaman is like the man in an old joke who is caught in a flood and goes up on the roof, where he intends to wait for God to rescue him. Person after person comes by in a rowboat, offering to take him to safety. No, thanks, he says. I know God’s going to save me. Finally the waters rise over him, and he dies. When he gets to heaven, he complains, I prayed and prayed, but you didn’t save me! And God answers, I sent four rowboats and you didn’t get into any of them.

We don’t claim the healings that come to us. Instead, we set the evidentiary bar so high for a miracle of healing that a dozen miracles happen to us and we don’t notice any of them. For us, a miracle has to be magic, full of special effects, before we’ll pay any attention. But most of the miracles we know are like rowboats. They come along regularly, but you have to get into them to get the full effect. When it comes to miracles, we are snobbish.

Who is it, after all, who encourages Naaman to go along with Elisha down to the river and wash, as the holy man has told him to do? His servants. Who persuades him to seek out Elisha, the famous holy man, in the first place? A little slave girl whom his soldiers had kidnapped from Israel. People without pretensions. People who have little to lose by looking foolish. People who know they don’t count for much in the worldly scheme of things.

Here’s the clue: there aren’t special miracles for "important people." They don’t heal differently from poor people but are simply other brothers and sisters in pain and sorrow, and in sharing the same joy in Christ. The unimportant go first in the order of this kingdom, leading the way for the rest of us. The hierarchy of worldly privilege is gone, and blessings tumble abundantly over everyone.

Yet the reluctance to claim the miracles continues in the Gospel reading from Mark. Here Jesus himself seems shy about what he has done. Don’t tell anyone, he warns the cleansed leper, but the man disobeys, and soon Jesus is on the run, hiding from the crowds. He draws back from the display of his power, even though his miracles are performed to show people that the kingdom is near.

Why? Is it because the people are not ready? Did they need to live through the weakness and despair of the end of Jesus’ story on earth before they can be trusted with the fullness of his power? Perhaps they need to know the darkness before they can handle that light. It is the same with Christians today Would we stick around to hear the whole story of who Jesus is if healing miracles were a common occurrence? Mightn’t we just pick up our miracle and go home?

Even those closest to Jesus sometimes resembled Naaman. They had a hard time with the ordinariness of him, with his humiliation at the hands of a powerful and corrupt authority. He was the Christ, they agreed. But he ought to show his power more explicitly. He ought to show them who he was. "If you are the Son of God, save yourself and come down from the cross" his enemies taunted him, and his friends wondered why he didn’t do just that.

But would "showing" them his power have made the difference in Jesus’ ministry? To claim a healing does not erase our humanness. The Jesus who healed people miraculously was also a person, and died in weakness. We claim a Jesus who is both God and human. Our faith and our human history walk through time together, and we can see God at work in the way faith and history influence each other.

Positive outcomes to problems do not certify the power of God except to those who read the story of humankind by the light of their faith. Believers are already disposed to see God’s power at work. For the others, those who were alive when he walked the earth but who didn’t claim the faith, Jesus’ life must have looked like a failure. Is that all? some must have said. He seemed so promisingly powerful. Was all that just destroyed? I’m glad I wasn’t foolish enough to believe. Think how embarrassed I’d be now.

We see this power because we claim it, because, in a sense, we decide to see God at work. Someone heals spontaneously, or survives a difficult surgery, and sees a miracle. Someone dies on a cross and the world sees failure and turns away. Others, however, glimpsed eternal life. They realized that they have a say in what they will accept and who they will follow.

Like them, we are not compelled by evidence. We are invited in, by faith.

Lame Excuse (Isaiah 43:18:25; Mark 2:1-12)

People in Jesus’ time thought that illness arose from people’s sins. They thought this happened in a fairly immediate cause-and-effect relationship. And they had thought so for a long time. Many of the psalms, like Psalm 41, allude to the idea: Heal me, for I have sinned against you.

Today we are more apt to think that illness afflicts us in a more random way. He "caught" a cold, we say, or he "developed" a tumor. Jesus, in the story of his healing of the paralytic, seems to offer his hearers room for both approaches: "Your sins are forgiven," he tells the stricken man, and a collective murmur of shock and disbelief goes up from the crowd at his presumption in declaring forgiveness of sins: Who does this guy think he is? To clear things up, Jesus commands the paralytic to take up his bed and walk. The man gets up, picks up his pallet and goes on home. Whether or not his malady arose from sin, the man is healed.

See, says God to Isaiah, I am doing a new thing. You thought you knew how the world works, but you know only so much. There are surprises in store for all of you, so stay tuned.

Many of the diseases that roamed the earth in ancient times, devastating all who crossed their paths, have now been tamed. Having conquered many of them, it seems that we will conquer all of them. Perhaps now we will have a world without illness, we think to ourselves, and then a new one comes along to terrify us. Still we have confidence: a cure is possible for anything if we just put enough research and enough money into finding it. And so we walk and bike and run for the cure. We give to the cancer society, the heart fund, the diabetes foundation. We no longer give up on the sick, no longer isolate them, content to believe that they have brought their illness upon themselves. That’s ancient history.

Or is it? We usually don’t give up on the sick; we usually don’t think they’ve brought it on themselves. But consider the history of the AIDS epidemic in this country, and how it was veiled in secrecy and shame for ten years before we faced it as a public-health problem. Think of the euphemisms still employed in the newspaper obituaries when someone has died of HIV-related illness. And consider the devastation that secrecy continues to cause in Africa and Asia. For reasons of politics and public relations, government after government has refused to admit that AIDS was a problem in its country until it became almost insurmountable. The numbers are staggering: 40 percent of the adult populations of some African nations may be infected. Half the children may become orphans in the next five years, with no healthy adults left to care for them. Denial has proved fatal.

Or consider mental illnesses. The New Testament people assumed they were caused by demon possession. We don’t think so today. Or don’t we? We still cloak these illnesses in shame and secrecy. When psychiatric illness grips its victims in behavior that isolates them and frightens those around them, we compound the misery by treating it like a failure of nerve or a character flaw. People are ashamed to admit they or someone they love has it, afraid someone will find out they’re in therapy or that they take antidepressants -- as if their illness were really a sin. And so they don’t seek treatment, those who love them cannot understand their symptoms, and victims suffer for decades. Research on cures for mental illness lags far behind that for other illnesses in urgency and funding. There are no telethons for schizophrenia, although 2.2 million adults in America are afflicted, compared with the 250,000 who live with muscular dystrophy, another incurable disease. But the Jerry Lewis Telethon raised $58,000,000 for muscular dystrophy in 2001 alone.

Jesus couldn’t have healed the paralytic if the man’s friends hadn’t been part of the project. He wouldn’t have known about him. They had to work to get in to see Jesus: the door was blocked with onlookers, and they had to come in through the roof. We think of ourselves, of our caution, of our careful attitude toward our own longing for healing: we don’t get our hopes up. What did they know that we don’t know? What did they know that made them think this would work, that Jesus could do something new in this man’s life? They must have been pretty sure, or they wouldn’t have stuck their necks out like that.

Or pretty desperate.

Maybe. But I think it was this: they loved their friend a lot. They hated what his illness and pain was doing to him. Love was the force that propelled them forward into such extreme action. It made them brave -- foolish, some of the onlookers might have said, but brave.

The Son of God is not yes and no, St. Paul says. In him it has always been yes. We may not think God sends heart disease or cancer to people because of their sins. We no longer charge God with the "no" in human history. But we do look to God for the "yes." We do know that God sends patient caregivers, dedicated researchers and physicians, devoted family and friends to walk with the ill through their painful journey, whether it be a journey toward cure or a journey toward a fuller life. Such people are sent from God whether they know it or not. Anyone who is part of the "yes" -- part of the healing, the comfort, the building-up -- is the servant of God.

Why is the Dead Sea Dying?

Across from Jericho, on the Jordan side of the Jordan River, is the site where Jesus may have been baptized. It is 300 meters east of the river. During the decades of conflict between Jordan and Israel this area was a military zone, strewn with mines and closed to unauthorized personnel, but since the 1994 Peace Treaty the mines have been cleared and the site is being developed by the Jordanian Ministry of Tourism. Access roads, parking lots, a tourist center and a path to the river have been built. The ruins of three Byzantine churches have been uncovered, and Pope John Paul II has given his imprimatur to the site by visiting it.

Tourists can walk down the path to the Jordan, but they had better not try to be baptized in it, for this river, so rich in religious symbolism, is dangerously polluted. It is also vanishing. And if they want to float in the Dead Sea -- not far from the baptism site -- enjoy its unusual buoyancy and the benefits of its unique mineral contents, they had better come soon. Its level is going down a meter a year. It could disappear by 2050.

What is making the Jordan vanish and the Dead Sea die? The Jordan Basin is being sucked dry to supply the farms and cities of Israel, Jordan and Syria with water. The center of the basin is Lake Tiberias (also known as the Sea of Galilee or Lake Kinneret), a natural reservoir for Israel. It receives water from the north and is controlled by the Deganya Gate at its southern end. Israel withdraws from the lake about 700 million cubic meters per year, which it puts into the National Water Carrier, the conduit supplying its population centers all the way to the Negev.

The country takes additional water from the lake for use by nearby towns, cities and farms. Because all these extractions total more than the average annual recharge, the level of the lake is falling. At the end of the summer of 2001, it reached its lowest level on record. The "red line" -- the level at which water extraction should stop -- has been repeatedly lowered by the Israeli water commissioner. It is now 2.5 meters lower than the original mark of 213 meters below sea level.

Today, no good-quality water flows through the Deganya Gate into the Jordan. Rather, brine is collected from springs on the floor of the lake and on its shores, carried around it and dumped into the river. Along the Jordan zigzag path to the Dead Sea, 100 kilometers as the crow flies, other saline waters and pollutants flow into it, but very little pure water.

Emptying into the Jordan ten kilometers south of Lake Tiberias, the Yarmouk River has historically supplied the river with 400 million cubic meters of water per year. But today the Jordanian government diverts water from the Yarmouk into the King Abdullah Canal to supply the people and farms of the Jordan Valley. Syria extracts water further upstream to supply its agriculture, and Israel withdraws water to supply the farms and settlements on the eastern shores of Lake Tiberias and in the Golan Heights. Thus, the discharge of the Yarmouk into the Jordan has been reduced to almost nothing. The only other major river flowing into the Jordan, the Zarqa, is blocked by Jordan’s King Talal Dam. Streams and springs exist on the Jordan’s east and west side, but their flow is minimal and seasonal.

Almost completely deprived of fresh water, the Jordan River has become a sewer. In addition to the brine dumped in at the northern end, run-off from Israeli fish farms and untreated sewage from Jewish settlements along the ridge of the Jordan Valley and from the Arab community of Jericho make their way into the river bed from the west. Untreated sewage and polluted irrigation return-flow, coming from farms and communities in Jordan, run into it from the east.

In the 1950s about 1.3 billion cubic meters of water a year flowed into the Dead Sea. The flow is now down to 300 million. When William Lynch, an American naval explorer, visited the mouth of the Jordan in April 1848, he estimated the river to be 180 yards wide and three feet deep. Now it is a few meters wide, more a creek than a river.

The Dead Sea is at the lowest point on earth, and nothing flows out of it. While seasonal streams on the eastern and western shores have contributed small amounts of water, the bulk of its supply has come from the Jordan, and evaporation has kept the level of the sea constant. However, since the 1960s the flow from the Jordan has dropped by 90 percent, and the surface level of the Dead Sea has dropped 25 meters. The southern end has dried up and is more an industrial zone than a sea. It is dotted with the evaporation ponds and factories of the Arab Potash Works on the Jordanian side, and the Dead Sea Works on the Israeli side.

Along the shores of the deeper northern end are stark cliffs, flowing springs and biblical sites. This is where the tourist hotels are located, perched on bluffs overlooking water that moves farther and farther away.

The disappearance of the deep blue, mineral-rich Dead Sea would be a disaster for tourism. Its demise also would have catastrophic effects on the area’s hydrodynamic equilibrium. The sea’s high-density salt water acts as a barrier, keeping the fresh water in the aquifers surrounding it from draining downwards, absorbing salts and escaping into the Mediterranean. These aquifers are used to irrigate farms, bring water to villages and feed springs, some of which are important to tourism.

To rectify this situation the Jordanian government is urgently trying to get the "Red-Dead" Canal built and is backing it at the highest levels. The plan is to pump water out of the Gulf of Aqaba, an extension of the Red Sea, and raise it to a level that permits it to flow downwards through a hydroelectric and a desalination plant. The brine would then be passed into the Dead Sea, and the desalinated water would be distributed to Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians. The project would require financing from the World Bank and the support of the governments of Israel, Germany and the U.S.

Sticky political issues would have to be addressed: Who will represent the Palestinians? How much water will they receive? And the environmental questions are numerous: What will happen when the brine from the desalination plant is mixed with the water of the Dead Sea? What will be the effect of a "new Dead Sea" on the unique species that currently live in and around it? How much will the massive construction project disrupt the environment?

In order to move the project forward, the Jordanian Ministry of Water and Irrigation is proposing that it be built in stages. First a series of tunnels, canals and shafts bringing water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea would be constructed, raising the Dead Sea back to its former level. Later, electricity-generation and water-desalination plants would be built. The advantage of this approach is that the Dead Sea would be "rescued," and the more expensive and environmentally controversial parts of the project would be put off until later.

Unfortunately, the current Israeli/Palestinian strife has disrupted cross-border communication about pressing environmental issues. In the heady and optimistic days of the mid-1990s, Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians and Egyptians communicated by telephone and e-mail, held conferences in each other’s countries, discussed issues of common concern and issued many reports.

One of these planners was Raouf Dabbas, appointed by Jordan’s Royal Court to head the environmental delegation from Jordan to the Young Leaders Network, a group of future leaders from Egypt, Jordan, Palestine and Israel. He is now president of the Friends of the Environment Society.

In an interview, he picked up a rubber band, stretched it, relaxed it and said: "The peace process is like this rubber band. Today it is very tight, and there is no flexibility left in it. Basically, we have a very polarized situation, where it is very difficult to have any discussion, dialogue or networking with the Israelis on various issues, most importantly the environment."

"Around 1996 the band was very flexible," he continued. "You could talk, you could negotiate, you could get things out into the open, in a very transparent, representative and democratic fashion, but in 1996 Netanyahu came to power, and things started to stagnate. And then Barak, and things got tighter. And of course Sharon. Now if the rubber band is not broken, it is only there by a strand."

He stated that public pressure has forced Jordanian environmental organizations to sever their contacts with Israelis. Formerly, they received millions of dollars from American and European organizations to carry out transnational projects, but now when they balance finances with survival, "they will take survival," said Dabbas. "And survival at this point cannot involve active projects with Israel." Another organization, EcoPeace, realized that it was losing supporters by having the word "peace" in its name, so it affiliated with Friends of the Earth International and became Friends of the Earth Middle East.

A "sacred river" has become a drainage ditch and the sea into which it empties is drying up. Restoring them to health will require a cooperation that can only come about when the area’s debilitating conflicts are resolved.

Gays and the Bible: A Response to Walter Wink

The tone of Walter Wink’s review of my book The Bible and Homosexual Practice ("To hell with gays?," Christian Century June 5-12) is a disheartening reminder of how mean-spirited the debate about homosexual behavior can get. The title is inflammatory. The first sentence smacks of paranoid conspiracy theories: "It was inevitable that the antihomosexual lobby would develop something equivalent to a neutron bomb designed to wipe out the homosexual lobby." He tells readers: "From the first page displays his loathing for homosexual behavior," ignoring my many exhortations to treat with sympathy and compassion those beset by homoerotic desire. Later he even demeans my family name, referring to "that ‘vague form of love’ which Gagnon gags on."

As someone once wrote: "What most saddens me in this whole raucous debate in the churches is how sub-Christian most of it has been." "No moral matter should be regarded as so urgent as to permit dehumanizing and demonizing our opponents.

God is confronting both sides of this controversy with an opportunity to transcend our verbal violence and put-downs, and to learn how to love, cherish, and value those whose positions are different from our own." Who wrote these comments? Wink himself in the 1999 book he edited, Homosexuality a 11(1 Christian Faith.

One wonders also why the Christian Century would allow such a disrespectful piece to go to press. An editorial in just the preceding issue opined about the need "to treat with dignity others who hold contrary opinions" in the homosexuality debate.

I see six other sets of issues raised by the review:

1) A consensus on Paul: One hears often that Paul opposed only exploitative forms of homosexual behavior. For example, in his edited book, Wink assumes that Paul was unable to conceive of committed adult homosexual relationships. The essay by Ken Sehested that immediately follows claims that Paul is indicting only pederasty and pagan cult prostitution.

It is refreshing to read now of Wink conceding this argument. He admits: "Paul wouldn't accept [a loving homosexual] relationship for a minute." He adds: "But that is precisely what is at stake here: a new judgment about the morality of same-sex relationships. This is some progress. Henceforth on whether Paul was opposed to every form of homoerotic behavior -- he was -- but on claims to a "new judgment about sexual morality.

Wink's 1990 article shows what he thinks this "new judgment" is: that "homosexual orientation" is a "natural" condition "fixed early in life." Apart from "fixed being too strong a word, this judgment is neither new nor decisive in considering whether to overturn Paul's stance. It fails to consider:

• Theories in the Greco-Roman world that some homoerotic attraction was due to congenital conditions, along with some recognition that desires given "by nature" are not necessarily constituted "according to nature."

• Paul’s own understanding of sin in Romans 5 and 7 as an innate impulse running through the members of the human body, passed on by an ancestor and never entirely within human control.

• Paul’s use of the term "natural" in Romans 1:26-27 to refer to the obvious embodied complementarity of males and females established by God at creation, not to all innate desires.

We can no longer assume that the notion of a sexual "orientation" was beyond Paul’s reach. What we can be confident of is that such a notion would not have caused Paul to change radically his view of same-sex intercourse as sin.

2) The relevance of the creation stories: Although Wink concedes that "the Bible is negative toward same-sex behavior," he rejects the grounding of my argument in Genesis 1-2. His reasons: 1) "Homosexuality is not mentioned in these chapters"; 2) I allegedly limit my case to the complementary fit of male and female genitals; and 3) "If monogamous heterosexual behavior alone satisfies the will of God"—a claim I nowhere make— "why didn’t Jesus marry? Why didn’t Paul?"

First, homoerotic unions need not be mentioned in the creation stories explicitly to be precluded implicitly. One can work through a series of literary concentric circles, picking up clues from themes within the creation stories; other material in the Tetrateuch from the same authors; other material in early Israelite literature; other material in the ancient Near East; and the subsequent history of interpretation.

As I argue. each of these literary circles confirms that the Yahwist and the Priestly Writers understood the negative implications of their creation stories fir homoerotic behavior. Jesus and Paul accepted this. Paul’s indictment of homoerotic behavior contains clear echoes of Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:24. Accordingly, when Jesus applied the same two texts to divorce (Mark 10:6-9), he was not divesting them of their relevance for proscribing homoerotic behavior. He was narrowing further an already closely defined heterosexual ethic.

Second, I make clear that the complementary character of male-female sexual bonds includes a range of features: anatomy, yes, and also physiological and interpersonal traits. Nowhere are male-female differences more significant than in sexual relationships. They contribute markedly to the health and vitality of heterosexual relationships: filling deficiencies and correcting extremes in the sexual "other" while reconciling the sexes. The story of the splitting of a binary human (the adam) into two sexually differentiated beings communicates the "normative" value of heterosexual unions—not just that they are "normal" (pace Wink). The establishment of a "one flesh" sexual union requires a re-merger of the two originally joined sexual halves. Far from being incidental, the sex of the partners is essential for achieving a holistic sexual fit.

Third, neither Jesus nor Paul would have regarded their singleness as challenging the heterosexual standard in the creation stories. They clearly did not conceive of Genesis 1:27 as requiring sex in order to manifest God’s image. Just as clearly they would have understood that, if sexual intercourse were to be had, there were ways of having it that would efface the image of God stamped on humans—including same-sex intercourse.

3) The use of analogies: Wink appeals to the church’s changing stances on slavery, women and divorce to justify deviating from the Bible’s opposition to homosexual practice. Wink claims that I "bury the real issue, which is whether the Bible’s clear rejection of same-sex relationships needs to be reinterpreted today." There is no burial on my part. I deal with the issue of analogies head on. The key question is: What are the best analogies? The analogies of slavery, women and divorce have great defects. In particular:

• There is tension within the canon itself on these issues. There is no tension regarding homosexual behavior.

• The Bible’s stance on slavery and women’s roles looks liberating in relation to the broader cultural contexts out of which the Bible emerged. The exact opposite is the case for the Bible’s stance on homosexual practice.

• Neither scripture nor the contemporary church celebrates divorce as part of the glorious diversity of the body of Christ. Divorce and same-sex intercourse share in common the fact that both are forgivable sins for those who repent. The church works to end the cycle of divorce and remarriage, just as it ought to work toward ending the cycle of serial, unrepentant same-sex intercourse.

The best analogies are those that most closely correlate with the distinctive elements of the

Bible’s opposition to same-sex intercourse: sexual behavior proscribed strongly and absolutely by both Testaments and pervasively within each Testament (at least implicitly), with the proscription making sense. Here one would include the Bible’s opposition to incest, bestiality, adultery and prostitution.

Incest is a particularly good parallel: it is sex with who is too much of a same or like. Bestiality is wrong because it is sex with a being that is too much of an "other." Scripture avoids both extremes, and so does the church today.

4) "The Bible has no sex ethic": Wink alleges that "the Bible has no sex ethic. It only knows a communal love ethic." in his 1999 article he distinguishes between a sexual ethic and sexual mores, with the Bible containing only the latter. Sexual mores are "unreflective customs" that fail to factor the circumstances of individual cases.

It is interesting to apply Wink’s reasoning to Jesus himself. For example, on a communal level, Jesus advocated that all believers should love one another. If Jesus had no separate sex ethic distinct from his communal ethic, wouldn’t we have to infer that Jesus was in favor of having sex with as many people as possible? Yet we know that Jesus’ teaching on divorce and remarriage promoted the limitation of lifetime sex partners to one. There are no grounds for such a radical step if Jesus had no distinctive sex ethic or had an aversion to categorical prohibitions.

Jesus had a specific sex ethic, as did all the authors of scripture. He recognized the validity of the love commandment in ways that run 180 degrees counter to Wink’s application. Jesus went beyond the Mosaic law in limiting sexual activity to one lifetime opposite-sex partner. Since Jesus’ view stood in tension with the prevailing ethos of his day, Wink cannot claim that it was an "unreflective custom" that Jesus failed to integrate with his interpretation of the love commandment. Did Jesus not understand the very love ethic that he promoted?

Wink’s only tests for a valid sexual relationship are that the relationship be mutual, loving and non-exploitative. Why not a loving adult incestuous union? A threesome? Using Wink’s tests, one could not categorically deny any form of consensual sexual relationship, except perhaps prostitution. Even prostitution might have to be allowed since Wink is appalled by the notion of anyone going through life without sex.

5) The social-scientific evidence: Wink alleges that I apply a "double standard" insofar as there are more heterosexuals who manifest promiscuity, failed relationships and sexually transmitted disease than homosexuals who do so. Yet in a society in which only 2 percent of the population engages in homosexual behavior in a given year it is meaningless to appeal to absolute numbers. The key point is that the negative effects attending homosexual behavior are disproportionately high, often grossly so.

Wink blames "books like Gagnon’s" for the dearth of long-term monogamous relationships among homosexuals. Yet the rate of non-monogamy among homosexual males is off the charts even in comparison with lesbians. The disparity largely has to do with male-female differences. Men are more visually stimulated and genitally focused than women; the results of a male-male erotic pairing are predictable. Women, however, generally make greater intimacy demands on relationships, which may explain why on average lesbian relationships are of shorter duration than male homosexual relationships. Furthermore, these problems persist even in homosexual-supportive areas such as San Francisco. The main culprit is probably sexual non-complementarity, not societal "homophobia."

On the question of changing orientation, Wink presupposes "a continuum from homosexual to heterosexual" in which "those at either end of the continuum may find it impossible" to change their sexual orientation. He affirms the orientation of all those who cannot change. There are three problems here.

First, more important than the supposition of a continuum is the recognition that the contours of the continuum are fluid. As the cross-cultural studies cited in my book indicate, the greater the societal approval of homosexuality, the greater the incidence. Also, the less intervention to counter risk factors early in life, the greater the entrenchment of homosexual proclivities.

Second, when Wink asserts that some people "may find it impossible" to change, he overlooks multiple meanings for change. Change can run the gamut from ceasing homosexual behavior, to a reduction in homosexual impulses, to the experience of heterosexual arousal. After ticking off a vice list in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, Paul said of the Corinthian believers: "such were sonic of you." He was not asserting, for example, that former adulterers no longer experienced sexual desire for people other than their spouses. Rather, they no longer lived out of such fleshly impulses but rather out of time power of the Holy Spirit.

Third, Wink argues as if the mere fact of an entrenched impulse not being consciously chosen is grounds for its acceptance. But why should this be a decisive factor? Some alcoholism, criminal behavior, and a whole range of non-criminal vices (e.g., selfishness, jealousy, greed, lust) are connected with entrenched impulses.

While some people are content with a single sex partner for life, large numbers find it extraordinarily difficult to limit the number of their sex partners to one, or even a dozen. Some people do not grow up with an instinctive aversion to having sex with close blood relations or with children. Have they chosen this condition?

The bottom line is that discerning whether a given disposition is moral has little to do with whether it may become entrenched early in life. Such a consideration should affect the degree of pastoral sensitivity but not whether the behavior arising from it should be condoned. Wink, perhaps unknowingly, appears to concede the point. For lie urges affirmation not only of "those who, for whatever reason, cannot" change their sexual orientation but also of those who "do not wish to do so."

6) Serial, unrepentant sin and its consequences: Wink reserves his greatest scorn for the view that sexual activity outside of marriage may risk one’s exclusion from God’s kingdom. For Wink this is intolerable because some people might have to go without sex. He charges inc with perpetrating "a cruel abuse of religious power."

The first problem with Wink’s argument is that this is not just my position. It is the position of all New Testament writers, the virtually unanimous position of the church for almost two millennia, and still the majority position in the church today. Indeed, Wink’s view makes Jesus Christ himself the main perpetrator of this "cruel abuse." For it was Jesus himself who, with his teaching on divorce/remarriage and adultery of the heart, limited further the range of permissible sexual activity. It was Jesus who, with a primary reference to sex, spoke of removing body parts that threaten one’s downfall lest one be thrown into hell (Matt. 5:29-30). Jesus was not schizophrenic when he integrated this vision with an aggressive outreach to sexual sinners.

In the name of Jesus Wink blames me, and implicitly the church as a whole, for advancing the teaching of Jesus. We face, then, the dilemma of choosing between Wink’s understanding of eternal destiny in relation to sexual conduct and the understanding of Jesus and scripture. Wink is also incredulous that I could say that sinful sexual behavior involves not just the actual act of illicit intercourse but also illicit sexual fantasies. Yet how else is one to apply Jesus’ statement about adultery of the heart (Matt. 5:27-28)? If Wink finds this position to be outrageous, his complaint lies with Jesus, not with me.

The second problem is that Wink presents only one side of my position. I frequently set the warnings about sin in a broader context of God’s marvelous grace and love in Christ Jesus, which is the primary warrant for ethical conduct. Wink even misquotes me, claiming that I say that "Change or be destroyed’ was the staple of Jesus’ teaching" when in fact I say "Change or be destroyed’ was a staple of Jesus’ teaching." He conveniently leaves out the fact that I stress scripture’s primary concern with a pattern of repetitive and unrepentant sinful conduct, not isolated acts of backsliding. I also state that I take seriously Jesus’ emphasis on "holy gullibility" with respect to accepting the genuineness of someone’s professed repentance (Luke 17:3-4).

The third problem is that Wink’s insistence on everyone having a right to sex fails to consider the following:

• Scripture nowhere makes sex an idol or an absolute necessity of life like food and sleep. Oftentimes God uses unfulfilled desire to form Jesus in us, as Paul discovered with his "thorn in the flesh."

• Why is sex a necessity for us but not for our spiritual ancestors? Were the authors of scripture, Jesus and church leaders over the last two millennia insensitive to the fact that they were creating legions of "sexually starved victims of a loveless religion"?

• Hope exists for individual homosexuals. For any given homosexual person hope exists for forming a heterosexual union that brings some satisfaction of sexual urges. Even apart from therapeutic intervention, the vast majority of self-identified homosexuals (non-bisexuals) have experienced some sexual attraction for the opposite sex at some point in their lives.

• How far do we extend the principle of a right to sex? There are twice as many people in the U.S. today who have had no sex partners since age 18 as there are people who classify themselves as (non-bisexual) homosexuals. How many New Testament commandments must we violate to ensure that the right to a sexual union is available to all heterosexuals? What if one can only get sex by soliciting prostitutes? What if one is sexually attracted only to one’s sister? How long does one have to put up with just one sex partner when one is not wired for monogamy?

Wink believes that it is cruel to develop sexual standards that might leave some people "sexually starved." Yet every sexual rule risks denying sex to some. Unless Wink wants to advocate complete sexual libertinism, he will either have to give up this view of entitlement to sex or else describe himself’ as someone who engages in a "cruel abuse of religious power." The very concept of "sexual starvation" holds God’s will hostage to the sexual desires of human flesh.

Wink’s sexual ethic does not promote freedom in the positive biblical sense. Rather it moves dangerously close to promoting the wrong kind of freedom, summarized in Judges as "all the people did what was right in their own eyes."

 

A Reply by Walter Wink

Robert Gagnon's treatment of my own work in his book The Bible and Homosexual Practice is anything but irenic. "Wink’s analysis has all the theological sophistication of a math test or football game: sixteen sexual policies in the Bible we no longer heed versus just four that we do. One may half wonder why Wink does not take his logic full circle and disregard the other four mores, particularly incest amid bestiality." Thus he tries to make me say the very opposite of what I have said.

My point, which is quite serious and, I believe, persuasive, is that biblical sexual mores changed over time, so much so that only four of 20 biblical sex mores are still in place for Christians today. This simple observation is enough to dash the notion of absolute sexual precepts universally valid in every time and place.

Gagnon makes no attempt to deal with my argument, which is, I believe, unanswerable.

Gagnon faults me for slighting the compassion he shows toward those beset by homoerotic desire. But that compassion, for him, is conditional on gays and lesbians being willing to change their sexual orientation or to not live out that orientation. I am certain that many homosexual Christians will find his assertion that they will otherwise be excluded from the kingdom of God a heartless and cruel judgment.

On the question of analogies, Gagnon says that the issues of slavery, divorce and the suppression of women are not analogous to the issue of homosexuality. His treatment of divorce contains some helpful insights, as does his exegesis generally (this is not a "concession," but an acknowledgment of the value of some of his arguments). But Gagnon misses the key point.

Moses allowed divorce. Jesus categorically rejected divorce. Paul moderated Jesus’ position by allowing a believer to divorce an unbelieving spouse if the spouse wishes to have the marriage dissolved (1 Cor. 7:12-16). The Gospel of Matthew liberalizes Jesus’ saying on divorce by adding an exception for adultery. Thus we see the church already altering Jesus’ commands in the light of new situations. If Gagnon sanctions this modulation of ethical demands within the canon, why shouldn’t we today feel authorized, in the light of new knowledge and the prompting of the Holy Spirit, to "judge for yourselves what is right" (Luke 12:57)?

Missing in Gagnon’s remarks is any sense of what it might have cost slaves, divorcees and women to be ground under foot by the thought police of Christianity. We can no longer simply submit to scripture without asking whether new light is needed to interpret it. I for one do not abandon scripture, but neither do I acquiesce. I wrestle with it. 1 challenge it. I am broken and wounded by it, and in that defeat I sometimes encounter the living God. I will not concede the field, therefore, to a putative orthodoxy that dodges the hermeneutical task.

On the issue of a sexual ethic, my distinction is not between a sex ethic and sexual mores, but between sexual mores, which change from time to time in every society, and a communal love ethic, which we must apply to whatever sexual mores are current. This demands a critique that involves not only the individual but also the community of accountability, which is the church. Apparently Gagnon does not approve of Augustine’s injunction, "Love God and do as you please," but I regard it as one of the most inspired ethical statements ever penned.

Gagnon tests my position by arguing that on my terms "one could not categorically deny any form of con-sensual sexual relationship, except perhaps prostitution." What has become of the community of accountability? Is the church likely to regard such behavior as upbuilding? And if the community were to lapse into promiscuity, would it not come under the kind of censure that Paul had to exercise in Corinth? I believe that the Holy Spirit iii the community of believers can lead us to make responsible decisions. My disagreement with Gagnon is itself a manifestation of that effort.

A third major issue is whether gays and lesbians can change, and, if so, to what degree. A gay person cannot be asked to repent for being gay unless one holds that sexual changes are really possible. I showed in my review that only people in the middle of the continuum from hetero to homo have any real chance of change. Gagnon’s case depends heavily on the possibility of change, and much of the data he uses are from the conservative InterVarsity Press.

Gagnon unfortunately failed to note that I said, "I would affirm any person who has been able to change his or her sexual orientation." Only then did I add, "but I also affirm all those who, for whatever reason, cannot or do not wish to do so." Those in the last category, who don’t or won’t (or can’t) wish to change, are damned to hell, according to Gagnon. (Hence the title of my article, which was added by the editors and which I rather like.)

Gagnon notes that time idea of damnation is "the virtually unanimous position of the church for almost two millennia." "Wink’s view makes Jesus Christ himself the main perpetrator of this ‘cruel abuse of religious power." Once again, the issue is hermeneutical. There are other passages where Jesus (or the early churches in his name) does speak of hell. But most such passages have been added by Matthew. Look in any concordance for the terms hell, hell of fire, eternal punishment, unquenchable fire, gnashing of teeth, eternal torture, and so on, and you will discover that almost all of these are found only in Matthew. Apparently Matthew had some unresolved anger at the persecutors of his church, and he wanted revenge.

More to the point, belief in a place of eternal torments is unworthy of the highest forms of Christian faith. Gagnon is certain that the Jesus he worships will exclude from God’s everlasting presence those who are unrepentant for sexual sins. He is welcome to such beliefs, but I find them reprehensible.

The homosexual Christians I know are indistinguishable from heterosexual Christians. If they are to be sent to hell, true Christianity requires, I believe, that we join them there, on the principle that the God we worship is a God of love and mercy who will see that no one is ever lost.

GAGNON'S REPLY TO WINK:

The Christian Century has allowed me a letter to respond to Walter Wink's reply in the August 14-27 issue.

Of note is what Wink does not say in his reply. Although allowed 3000 words, Wink took only 1000 and chose not respond to most of my critiques. Yet they go to the heart of his case. In view of this and the 150 pages in my book devoted to hermeneutical concerns, it is ironic that Wink should insinuate that he engages in the hermeneutical task while I "dodge" it.

I stand by my statement that his counting method lacks "theological sophistication." Wink gives no attention to developing criteria for discerning the closest analogues to the Bible's core proscription of same-sex intercourse. He claims that I try to make him "say the very opposite of what [he] said." Actually, his reply suggests that he is more extreme than I previously thought. For he insists that there are no "absolute sexual precepts universally valid in every time and place." This will be good news for practitioners of bestiality, incest, adultery, pedophilia, prostitution, or rape. Wink also claims: "Gagnon makes no attempt to deal with my argument, which is, I believe, unanswerable." On the contrary, I have been answering him. He can now see 18 more pages of documentation on my web page.

Wink also misses the key point about the divorce analogy: the "modulation" he speaks of falls far short of a precedent for completely overhauling a pervasive, absolute, and strong prohibition in Scripture. He assures us that in the absence of any absolute sexual standards "the community of accountability" will guard against "promiscuity," or come under "the kind of censure that Paul had to exercise in Corinth." Ironically, "promiscuity" wasn't the problem in 1 Corinthians 5. The problem was adult, consensual incest-sex between familial likes. A relationship of this sort flies under the radar of Wink's tests for invalid sexual relationships.

Another irony: Wink applies his two favorite prooftexts-"judge for yourselves what is right" (Luke 12:57) and "Love and do as you please" (Augustine, Homilies on the First Epistle of John 7.8)-to say the opposite of what they say in their original contexts. The former urges people to recognize the need for repentance before the Day of Judgment comes; the latter extols reproof done in love as superior to tolerance of bad behavior.

Wink says: "A gay person cannot be asked to repent for being gay unless one holds that sexual changes are really possible." Yet I never said that a person with homosexual proclivities must repent for the mere experience of such proclivities. Where Wink and I differ is over the following statement: "A person who experiences homoerotic urges cannot be asked to repent for engaging in homosexual behavior." Wink believes this; I do not. If the statement were true, then I suppose a pedophile, a person sexually attracted to a family member, a person unfulfilled by one sex partner, and a person stimulated by coercive sex could not be asked to repent for acting on their impulses. Wink simply ignores each of the three main points that I make about change in my response. Moreover, most of the data about change in my book comes from pro-homosex researchers, not conservative presses.

He contends that Jesus did not link serial unrepentant immoral behavior with exclusion from "God's everlasting presence." Wink blames judgment talk on Matthew's "unresolved anger." His claim about Jesus is historically untenable. Even if one eliminated all Matthean special material, one would still have to contend with over a fourth of all sayings material in Q, Mark, and Luke's special source. The bottom line: the view that Wink slanders as "reprehensible," "a cruel abuse of religious power," and "unworthy of the highest forms of Christian faith" was a consistent and significant theme of Jesus' message. Jesus' understanding of love was deeper and more complex than Wink's. For Jesus love included caring enough to warn about the eternal consequences of serial unrepentant sin.

Wink does not love more than those who want to withhold incentives for homosexual behavior. He may love less. He simply starts with a different set of premises, including disregard for core values in the teaching of Jesus and Scripture and disregard for the harmful effects of promoting homosexual behavior and other extramarital sexual activity.

I am grateful to the Christian Century for the opportunity to respond to Wink. Still, this letter does not even begin to scratch the surface of Wink's logical and historical inconsistencies. I refer interested readers to my extensive rejoinder to his reply and article posted at <http://www.pts.edu/gagnonr.html>.

Still Untouchable: The Politics of Religious Conversion

In their long struggle for equality, India’s dalits, or "untouchables," have often exchanged their Hinduism for Islam, Christianity, Sikhism or Buddhism, believing that they will better their lives by doing so. They have been persuaded that Hinduism, with its varna ashramas (caste distinctions), has been solely responsible for all their ills. But when they switch to other religious faiths and experience the same distinctions -- albeit in different forms – they realize that such a change neither improves their social status nor remedies their economic problems of unemployment and poverty -- the real source of their social discrimination.

A letter written by M. Mary John, president of the Dalit Christian Liberation Movement, to Pope John Paul II during his 1999 visit to India speaks volumes about the treatment meted out to dalit Christians within the churches of India. The dalits are oppressed and persecuted by "the hierarchy, the congregation, the authorities and the institutions of the Catholic Church." Despite the condemnation of such practices by the Catholic Bishops Conference of India, casteism still persists among Christian communities. A state commission on dalits has pointed out that they are "twice discriminated against" -- in society and within the church. At the time of conversion, they are assured that they are being inducted into a religious fold that is egalitarian and free from the twin curses of caste and untouchability. But the reality is altogether different.

Sikh places of worship have separate quarters for dalit Sikhs. High-caste Muslims do not marry dalit Muslims. Dalit Christians can hardly hope to reach any high position within the church. (They are not even allowed to occupy the pews meant for higher-caste Christians.) And Buddhist monasteries have not been able to prevent their converts from continuing their earlier casteist practices.

At the same time, in breaking away from Hinduism, dalits lose out on the basic safeguards provided to them in the Indian Constitution. In 1981, thousands of dalits in southern India converted to Islam to escape social victimization -- only to find that they had forfeited whatever state privileges they enjoyed earlier as Scheduled Caste Hindus. Converted dalits are now fighting for these privileges, having perceived the age-old caste system still dogging their footsteps. The very fact that they still have to label themselves as "dalits" even after conversion in order to seek special privileges exposes the futility of that exercise. Today, India’s dalits are 82 per cent Hindu, 12 per cent Muslims and less than 3 per cent Christian.

A mass conversions of dalits to Buddhism in recent months in India poses the question once again whether religious conversion alone can improve the social and economic status of people who have been marginalized for centuries. Some 50,00 dalits assembled in New Delhi in November to embrace Buddhism. In January another 25,000 followed suit in the southern state of Kerala. Such conversions expose the hypocrisy of the religious and political leaders who exploit the socially and economically backward groups for their own ends.

In the November mass conversion, participants from both northern and southern states converged on India’s capital city. They were led by Ram Raj, an official working for the Indian Revenue Service, who also heads the All India Confederation of Scheduled Caste/Schedule Tribes Organizations. Giving himself a new name and identity after his own conversion, he used the occasion to lash out at the Bharatiya Janata Party -- led Government at the Center, claiming that it had denied opportunities to the dalits.

Subsequently, the converts recited the 22 vows taken by Baba Saheb Ambedkar, founder of the dalit movement in India, who in a similar exercise in 1956 had embraced Buddhism, along with half a million other dalits, "to escape the tyrannies" of Hindu society. Senior monk Buddha Priya initiated the new converts into the Buddhist fold. Surprisingly, well-known Christian activists also participated in the conversion ceremony to provide "moral support" to the dalit movement. Although no Christian literature was circulated, a Syrian Christian bishop who had traveled all the way to New Delhi sat through the ceremony, offering to convert to Christianity anyone who desired it.

Dalits seem to prefer Buddhism to other religions unless they are enticed with gifts or other allurements. The reason is that Ambedkar, who was also one of the main architects of the Indian Constitution, stated that of all religions only Buddhism advocates equality of all human beings as a fundamental principle. Declaring that Lord Buddha alone raised his voice against separatism, and that the religion he taught is the only one which does not recognize caste, the dalit leader exhorted his followers to convert to Buddhism -- "which is a religion of this country" -- rather than Christianity, which enticed the poor and the oppressed "by giving them porridge free of cost."

It has also been argued that Buddhists are accepted more easily in Indian society than other minority groups. Since Buddhism, like Jainism or Sikhism, is an Indic religion, it is not considered alien. Christianity and Islam are both perceived by Hindus even today as the religions of the conquerors and invaders.

"Dalit" literally means depressed. Mahatma Gandhi named these hapless citizens Harijans, meaning "the children of God." In the ancient and much abused system called varna ashrama, citizens were originally divided into castes based upon the professions they followed. Even during the days of British rule, manual workers in India’s villages were placed in the lowest hierarchy of the caste system. It was only after independence in 1947 that the govenment instituted a policy of affirmative action, through its Constitution, to reduce these inequalities.

By reserving 23 percent of all central and state government jobs for Scheduled Castes and Tribes, with comparable reservations for school and university admissions across the country, India paved the way for improving dalits’ professional and educational opportunities. They also have seats in legislatures, state assemblies and Parliament so as to allow them greater participation in the country’s governance. Conversion, unfortunately, only deprives the dalits of these special privileges, which are intended only for Hindu Scheduled Castes and Tribes.

The answer, then, is not in religious conversion so much as in streamlining the system of reservations itself. While this system has gone a long way to better the economic status of India’s 82 million Scheduled Castes and Tribes, it has lost its direction because it is not envisioned as a time-bound program. The earlier beneficiaries and their progeny continue to enjoy its privileges even after half a century. These privileges are now passed on to the second and sometimes to the third generation. Families who have reaped the full benefits of the Indian governments reservation policies have already advanced in both social and economic terms. And they continue to corner desirable jobs and university or school admissions through the reserved quotas.

Result: the poorest sections of the same reserved categories are denied their due. It is not uncommon, especially in rural India, to find poor and illiterate Scheduled Caste workers serving as the bonded laborers of their rich and influential kinsmen. An insidious caste system has thus crept into dalit circles as well. Privileged members of the community do not many those doing menial jobs, since they consider them inferior. A few years ago, the Indian government reduced the opportunities of dalits further by extending reservations to other backward castes. And lately the government in New Delhi has extended reservations in promotions to those who have already benefited by its policies. Consequently, almost every caste is seeking the "backward" tag to claim a piece of the pie.

No wonder this poorest and most backward segment of India’s population is constantly exploited: by politicians for their votes; by religious leaders for their numbers; by their self-styled advocates for power. Despite much touted policies of compulsory primary education, there are no proper school facilities for dalit children, Family planning and other health-care programs rarely reach dalit women. Illiterate, impoverished and vulnerable, the Scheduled Castes cannot even reach the jobs that are earmarked for them because they are not qualified.

These crucial issues are completely ignored by their champions, who prefer to harp on caste discrimination and religious conversion rather than take the real measures that might improve dalits’ lives.

Worship and Renewal: Surveying Congregational Life

Analysts of industrial nations often are perplexed by the continuing high level of religious activity in the United States. According to historians, this persistent vitality of congregational life is the result of overlapping waves of renewal rather than a steady growth from pioneer strengths. A recent survey, known as Faith Communities Today (FACT), reveals that three causes of this renewal are still evident across America -- and that one of these provides good news for the oldline Protestant churches.

Perhaps the most characteristically American source of this renewing energy is immigration. All oldline Protestant denominations (as well as most streams of U.S. Catholicism and Judaism) are immigrant in origin. New waves of immigration bring new ethnic religious groups to our shores.

A second agent of renewal has been the development of characteristically American religious movements -- most with Protestant roots. Several have developed into sizable denominations, the largest and best known being what we now call the United Methodist Church. These two sources of renewal are demonstrated dramatically in the FACT research.

The accompanying graph shows the percentage of congregations organized by denominational families during various periods of time. The purple line shows the continual surge of evangelical Protestantism. Hidden within the purple aggregate are data revealing that between 1980 and 2000 the major source of evangelical Protestant growth was the Assemblies of God, a denomination that originated in the U.S. in the early years of the 20th century. Also hidden in the purple aggregate is the fact that during the 1990s the fastest growing segment of the Assemblies was its Latino congregations.

Even more dramatic is the percentage growth from 1990 to 2000 of the indigenous Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the largely immigrant Islamic community, shown in the green line.

When oldline Protestant churches began experiencing membership losses in the mid-1960s, the primary cause of the decline was their failure to adapt to social and demographic changes. There was, however, no clear agreement on a path or paths to renewal.

Within the past decade it became evident that more contemporary and expressive styles of worship were beginning to creep from west to east and from neo-Pentecostal into oldline Protestant congregations. The FACT data show that new and so-called blended forms of worship have now made it to the east coast and even into some oldline churches.

More important, the data show that this style of worship -- measured in the survey by the use of electronic instruments in worship -- is correlated with membership growth across all Protestant families, including oldline denominations. The FACT data show that contemporary worship is more strongly associated with membership growth than with what Dean Kelley called "strictness," or with the outward focus of mission-minded congregations, or even with shifts in population. The relationship between contemporary forms of worship and membership growth is as strong for older congregations that changed their worship patterns as for new congregations that have used contemporary forms from the beginning. Further, participants in congregations using contemporary styles of worship are, on average, notably younger. The FACT data suggest that changing worship style is a path to renewal and membership growth.

Three caveats to this observation. First, introducing contemporary styles of worship is not a panacea. Even among Protestants there are many vital and growing congregations that worship in traditional ways. In our increasingly niche-oriented religious marketplace, it stands to reason that variety should flourish. Creative adaptation that matches heritage and identity with context appears more important than mere application of a worship "solution."

Second, "contemporary" has different meanings in different faith traditions, and we have yet to analyze fully the new data on how "contemporary" adaptations relate to vitality among Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Jews and Muslims.

Third, the FACT data show that congregations that seek to change their style of worship will have to pay the price of conflict. The organizational consultants are right: change is costly, conflict is one of the significant costs, and the ability to deal with controversy is one of the essential capabilities of adaptive congregations.

Sarah Coakley Reconstructs Feminism

Sarah Coakley came to Harvard in 1993, hired as part of then-dean Ronald Thiemann’s plan to bring more religiously committed faculty to liar-yard Divinity School. (Jon Levenson, an Orthodox Jew, was hired at about the same time.) If Thiemann wanted someone who embodied the soul of Anglicanism -- both its theological commitments and its style -- he could hardly have chosen better, Coakley is quite English, and therefore quite unlikely to raise her voice. Her clothes, ~ as well tailored as her sentences. Her theological interests -- patristics, feminism, the Trinity, charismatic prayer -- bespeak the Anglican ability to love both tradition and the freewheeling questioning of it.

Her work has had a growing influence, and she is embarking on a four-volume systematic theology which will be the first major systematics attempted from a feminist perspective. A more unusual niche may be that of priest-scholar at Harvard, where once a week the recently ordained Coakley celebrates an ecumenical Eucharist (following the Anglican rite) that regularly draws about 25 students and faculty, sometimes as many as 60. In the role of teacher and pastor, she feels closest to her Anglican roots.

Anglicanism should not be confused with its American branch, Episcopalianism, Coakley says. "I began the ordination process in 1998," Coakley told me as we sat in her small office at Harvard, appointed with a Persian rug and a plush red sofa. ("It was too small to be a library, so I turned it into a boudoir.") "I had to decide whether to offer myself as an Episcopalian or an Anglican.

"I think Anglicanism has many faults, but also strengths. One of its strengths arises from its own muddle. What arose from the conflict between Henry VIII and the pope was a church that had to honor both Catholic and Protestant Reformed tendencies. Now in our postmodern condition, the incoherence in Anglicanism that has been scoffed at as a joke can instead be seen as a tendency to sit at a table with someone with whom you disagree and find a way to get along.

"Anglicans know they’ll have to bring together people who fundamentally disagree -- from almost -- Calvinist Protestants to high-in-the-sky Catholics. At its best, Anglicanism really does moderate between extremes. It unites a strong Reformed sensibility with a strong Catholic sensibility. It shows a postmodern respect for difference. I’m an Anglican not because I enjoy incoherence. I’m an Anglican because of respect for the tradition of the priest-scholar."

Born to a family of lawyers, Coakley decided at age 13 that she wanted to be a theologian. "I think many people have an intensely religious puberty," she told me. "It was a time of spiritual intensity and burgeoning intellectual questioning." She read from her mother’s bookshelf the letters of Evelyn Underhill, an Anglican spiritual director of the 1930s and 1940s who wrote in a mystical vein about prayer and contemplation. She also read John Robinson’s Honest to God, a "1960s rational purgation and critique of what Robinson saw as an idolatrous and outmoded view of God."

After high school at the Black Heath School, founded in the 1860s by protofeminists "to produce women who could beat men at their own game," Coakley entered Cambridge, where she studied with Robinson and "chucked out prayer and the ritual dimension" of faith. Robinson defeated the Underhill of her adolescent reading; the rational triumphed over the mystical.

Until she came to Harvard in 1973 on a fellowship. In the new-world Cambridge, Coakley sang in the ecumenical Harvard University choir and participated in the Eucharist at the regular weekday service celebrated by the Cowley Fathers, an Anglican order with roots in the Oxford movement of the 1830s. "I rediscovered the Anglo-Catholic tradition with them," Coakley said.

Coakley and her husband, Chip, a Syriac scholar, took jobs at the University of Lancaster, where she finished her dissertation on the German theologian Ernst Troeltsch (hardly anybody’s idea of an Anglo-Catholic). That unpredictability and catholicity of interests was common at Lancaster in the 1970s. Lancaster was home to England’s first ‘religious studies" department, in the sense that theology was taught there from a critical rather than a confessional perspective. John Milbank, the theologian of "radical orthodoxy" who now teaches at the University of Virginia, was there. So, too, were scholars of Islam and Buddhism.

Teaching Christianity disinterestedly, as a subject for inquiry rather than as a faith commitment, was tonic for Coakley, whose own Christianity was deepened by the Lancaster approach, as well as by the school’s democratic atmosphere: "It was such an equal place. There was this small coffee room, and everybody would come in, the staff, too. There was this cleaning lady who would come in smoking fags and say things like, ‘Who’s this Derrida?"’

Coakley’s most important articles have been collected in Powers and Submissions. Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Blackwell, 2002). It’s not an easy read, not as a whole nor in its various parts. She tosses off Greek terms and German concepts with such aplomb, in intricate prose, that even on the page her voice resounds with a toff’s accent. If theologians like Gordon Kaufman and Stanley Hauerwas are plainspoken Americans, reared on Strunk and White, then Coakley is the George Eliot of theologians, whose theology always comes in the most syllables possible.

In the thicket of verbiage are two main clearings, general themes that reappear. The first is that feminist theory is a powerful tool not always well used. The second is that prayer needs to be a central category of theology.

Feminist theology has for 30 years been concerned with overturning the misogynist assumptions of the Bible and the Christian tradition, from Paul to Augustine to the present. In this critique, the church fathers have been regarded as men of a sexist time whose work presumed the inferiority of women (as well as woman’s responsibility for the introduction of evil into the world). While never denying that Christian feminism should play a corrective role, Coakley also believes that it can be used constructively to provide a new appreciation for certain early church figures.

Sexual taboos have long been used to argue that women should be silent or modestly attired or even cloistered, lest they tempt men. Because lustful sin, carnality, has been seen as "female," then a denial of the carnal is "male." Such a denial elevates the "male" sphere of reason over the "female" spheres of emotion, sex, irrationality -- anything that the serpent might have loosed in Eden because of Eve’s sin. Coakley wants to apply a feminist insight -- that the dichotomy of rationality versus irrationality, logos versus carnality, has been conceptualized in terms of gender -- to the Trinity and to its early explicators.

Some of the church fathers then appear different -- more feminine? -- when we consider not just their misogynist statements but also their resistance to the hegemony of stark reason. Instead of just calling them sexist, Coakley suggests, we might use the tools of feminist discourse to see how they allowed an erotic element into their understanding of the Trinity, thereby subverting the male mode of passionless thought.

In her article "‘Batter my heart . . .’: On Sexuality, Spirituality, and the Christian Doctrine of the Trinity," Coakley sets out three "axioms" of her approach to the Trinity. First, Coakley argues,

visions of God as the Trinity see the inner trinitarian relationships (that is, the relations between Father, Son and Spirit) as a prototype or charter for right relationships tout court. Thus . . . if ‘the personal is the political’ (to use the familiar feminist slogan), then no doctrine of the Trinity, however construed, can be wholly devoid of political, spiritual and sexual implications.... The task of a Christian feminist, then, will be to ferret out those connections and implications, and, if necessary, criticize and redirect them.

Coakley is saying that any vision of the Trinity that lacks a political and sexual component -- both of great concern to feminist theologians, liberation theologians and the like -- is a false or at least sorely lacking description.

What are the sexual implications of the Trinity? The question leads to her second axiom: "An analysis of Christian prayer, especially relatively wordless contemplative or charismatic prayer, provides an acutely revealing matrix for explaining the origins of trinitarian reflection" More specifically, a feminist reclaiming of Romans 8, which describes how the Spirit prays in us to God the Father, may yield a new and fruitful understanding of the Trinity, one that begins not with the mystery of how the Son could partake of both Divine Father and human substance, but with the Spirit, in the guise of praying.

By beginning with the Spirit, we can rediscover charismatic, passionate prayer in the Trinity, which again shifts the emphasis away from scholasticism (male) and toward embodied, even erotic, experience (female). Paul writes that "the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express" (Rom. 8:26). Here is a place to look for an understanding of the Spirit -- the obscurest part of the Trinity for most Christians.

In "Why Three? Some Further Reflections on the Origins of the Doctrine of the Trinity," Coakley writes that "it is the perception of many Christians who pray either contemplatively or charismatically that the dialogue of prayer is strictly speaking not a simple communication between an individual and a distant and undifferentiated divine entity, but rather a movement of divine reflexivity, a sort of answering of God to God in and through one who prays."

If Coakley is correct to view the Trinity in that light, seeing the Spirit as a prayerful medium for communication with the Father and Son, then she must also be right that the one who prays should always allow for the possibility of her prayer turning charismatic, under the influence of the Spirit. And thus the third axiom, the overtly feminist move in Coakley’s theology of the Trinity: she thinks that "the Church had politico-ecclesiastical reasons for preventing this vision of God, with its prioritization and highlighting of the Spirit, from getting too close to center stage."

Emphasizing the Spirit could release the Christian from the rational constraints of logos, and that could lead to heresies like second-century Montanism, a movement based on prophetic utterances rather than dispassionate theologizing. The early church, then, may have suppressed theological traditions that seemed to make room for ecstasy and prophecy. A rational church was a safer church.

Coakley is happy to admit that her argument is speculative. Why did the church fathers refuse to discuss the Trinity the way Coakley wishes to discuss it? Especially when, as she notes, Gregory of Nyssa and Origen, in works like their "startling and erotically daring commentaries on the Song of Songs," expressed affinities that seemed to undermine the primacy of Logos? We will never know. But feminist hermeneutics have always been better at raising new questions than at answering them. The question here -- "To understand the Trinity, why not begin with prayer?" -- is fresh and powerful.

Coakley’s feminist approach has led her to the more controversial suggestion that concepts like "submission" and "vulnerability" have been attacked too categorically by feminists. While it is true that the exalting of vulnerability has been used to push women into a demeaning self-abnegation, there is another kind of vulnerability, an empowering, Christian vulnerability, which ought not be sacrificed on the cross of leftist academic fashion.

She defends vulnerability by pointing toward its usefulness in prayer. In "Kenosis and Subversion: On the Repression of ‘Vulnerability’ in Christian Feminist Writing," she argues that the "paradox of power and vulnerability" is best exemplified by "this act of silent waiting on the divine in prayer. . . . Such prayer may use a repeated phrase to ward off distractions, or be wholly silent; it may he a simple Quaker attentiveness, or take a charismatic expression (such as the use of quiet rhythmic ‘tongues’)." Such solitary, contemplative prayer leaves you naked and expectant, and it necessarily involves risk -- which may he why it’s more difficult to imagine men participating in it.

"But whilst risky, this practice is profoundly transformative, empowering in a mysterious ‘Christie sense. . . . If, then, these traditions of Christian ‘contemplation’ are to be trusted, this rather special form of ‘vulnerability’ is not an invitation to be battered; nor is its silence a silencing. (If anything, it builds one in the courage to give prophetic voice.)"

Coakley adumbrates a feminist corrective to feminism: power can come from vulnerability -- from prayerful vulnerability, which is not, say, submission to a Mother Superior. This formulation is vintage Coakley: she takes a feminist concern -- the vulnerability of women -- examines it with the scholastic tools of an Anglican scholar, and finally arrives at a conclusion sympathetic with the whole range of Anglican devotion, from charismatic prayer to a more cerebral, Quaker-style attentiveness.

Coakley’s approach has the advantage of locating feminist interpretation within a specific religious tradition, observes Amy Plantinga Pauw, who teaches theology at Louisville Presbyterian Seminary. ‘The unmasking of the false universalism of ‘women’s experience’ in the so-called third wave of Christian feminism has complicated appeals to the ‘liberation of women as the goal of feminist theology," Pauw says. "Liberation of which women, and from what?" By infusing her feminism with an identifiably Anglican set of concerns (patristics and ecclesiology, for example), Coakley points the way for black Baptist feminists or Pentecostal feminists to do work that elevates their own traditions.

Most important is Coakley’s reminder that such prayer "builds one in the courage to give prophetic voice." At first, that seems a bit of an add-on, but Coakley is deeply interested in how prayer can transform not just the self, but society. ("The idea that St. Teresa was just having a private orgasm is a [William] Jamesian idea.") Her theological investigations have a pastoral component, one that introduces her to more actual Christians than many theologians get to meet.

Coakley’s projected four volumes are on, respectively, the Trinity, the "positive side" of a Christian anthropology ("What does the human life look like if’ you’re on the road to the beautiful vision?"), the negative side of a Christian anthropology (sin and atonement), and finally Jesus Christ. "You need to be clear on God and man to be clear on Christ. He’s the most mysterious problem."

In this project, Coakley is attempting to write a théologie totale, in homage to the French annaliste school of historians who used varied disciplines – economics, sociology, philology, history -- to answer historical questions. "For every question I investigate," Coakley said, "I use a novel method, like artistic criticism, or [sociological] fieldwork." Each book, for example, has a "pastoral investigation."

The first volume will incorporate her findings among Anglican charismatics, based on work she did for the Church of England’s Doctrine Commission. The second and third will draw on the semester she spent teaching silent contemplation to young black criminals in a Boston jail. These theological tactics pay homage to her early love of Troeltsch, with his concern for social "types" and their relation to different sorts of theological forms. "I’m trying to see how various forms of trinitarianism (and antitrinitarianism) flourish in different social and ecclesial settings."

Teaching imprisoned blacks to be silent could sound suspiciously like teaching women to be "vulnerable" -- and might draw objections from the same crowd. "Many would say, ‘She’s teaching oppressed people how to live with their oppression.’" Coakley said. "But there’s a dignity in learning to live with their own inner noise in a situation where they’re being constantly abused. There’s nothing more powerful than sitting in silence with 40 men in jail with all the commotion around you."

Coakley was not the first Christian to figure out that power comes from powerlessness, but it is a lesson that seems curiously remote from our times, one that demands fresh repetition. By saying that English charismatics and imprisoned criminals may be the stuff of theological reflection, and by tying their prayer to the Trinity, the Trinity to Romans 8 and Romans 8 to Origen, Coakley mixes old wine in some very new jugs.

Charles Hefling, an Episcopal priest who teaches theology at Boston College and who in the mid-1970s sang with Coakley in the Harvard choir, identifies a common thread running through all of Coakley’s interests, from Troeltsch to Gregory to the practice of the priesthood: "Sarah, like Troeltsch, is interested in religion, in its practices and how they shape both thought and feeling. To use a term from Newman . . . . it is through the devotional, ‘spiritual,’ prayerful practice of Christianity that one has a ‘real apprehension’ (as contrasted with a merely ‘notional apprehension’) of what doctrinal statements are all about."

Coakley’s scholarship is too sound, and her manner too congenial, for her to have sworn enemies. But she would have little claim to a prophetic, priestly voice if she did not make some people uncomfortable. David Ford, Coakley’s fellow student at Cambridge and now a professor there, observes that Coakley’s views upset "those among her fellow feminists who have written off mainstream Christian faith and churches; theologians who either are unhappy with her way of bringing together systematic theology and contemplative prayer or who consider that the thoroughness of her engagement with philosophy and other disciplines makes her too ‘liberal’; and secular thinkers who are surprised by such an intelligent, sophisticated and ethically convincing presentation of Christian faith."

That list of antagonists makes Coakley a significant figure in the theological landscape, especially at a school like Harvard. Deeply informed by the disinterested "religious studies" approach to religion, she remains committed to theologizing on behalf of the church. She is concerned that Harvard does not appear to share that commitment. "The rhetoric is that we’re still engaged in the formation of clergy," she observes, but she worries that the school is moving further toward the religious-studies model. It’s possible that Coakley’s weekly Eucharist, as well as her kind of Christian scholarship, will become marginal to the university. If so, they will be all the more significant for the church.

Miroslav Volf Spans Conflicting Worlds

When I talked to Yale theologian Miroslav Volf last summer, he was being considered as possible dean of Harvard Divinity School. He had told Harvard’s president Lawrence Summers quite clearly that if he were to head the school, he would want to lead HDS back to its roots in constructive theology and the formation of Christian ministers. Not that disciplines like comparative religion or social science would be banished. But Volf had no interest in presiding over a school where the expression of evangelical belief was unchic.

As it turned out, Volf was not offered the job, so we won’t know how that partnership would have worked. Volf did say, afterward, that he thought Harvard was making a mistake by going the "religious studies" route.

"I don’t think analysis of religion suffices. I’m happy to benefit from sociology, anthropology, psychology. But you have a vibrant religious world, and academics sometimes aren’t aware of how potent 2 billion Christians, 1 billion Muslims and all the other religious folks are. If you just analyze religion, you’re doing good work, but socially you’re inconsequential. You’re not shaping the world."

Volf might seem like an unusual person for Harvard even to have considered. But then Volf is unusual in many settings. He is a Pentecostal among evangelicals, a mainline Christian among evangelicals, and an evangelical in the mainline. Growing up, he was a Christian among communists.

"Mine was a quieter type of Pentecostalism, one more associated with the holiness tradition," Volf told me when I asked about his Pentecostal upbringing. There was more a sense of "waiting upon the Lord, rather than taking fortresses by storm -- the machine-gun type of Pentecostalism.

"My father was the general secretary of the Pentecostal movement of Croatia, and I became a Christian at 16. I attended all these camps and meetings, and we prayed late into the night for baptism in the spirit. For me, it was a meditative experience."

"Did you speak in tongues?’ I asked.

Volf gave me the look of a man not often caught off guard who has suddenly been caught off guard.

"I haven’t thought about this for a long time," he said after a long pause. "I have, as a young person, ‘spoken in tongues.’ It was a result of prayer in search of words that couldn’t find them. There was nothing miraculous in what I experienced. I experienced it as a freeing. It came gently, then subsided."

Pentecostals in Croatia, I learned, do not fit the American model of Pentecostals. Peter Kuzmic, Volf’s brother-in-law (he married Volf’s sister, Vlasta), a professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, pointed out that in Croatia evangelical Christianity offered a refuge from communist mind control and from ethnoreligious ideology.

"In the U.S," Kuzmic said, "Pentecostal churches emphasize gifts of the spirit over the apostolic spirit of the transcendent church. . . . But in Tito’s Yugoslavia, we were part of an evangelical world that was more a subculture. We were in a unique position to become bridge builders and reconcilers. If you listen to the Croatian Catholics, you can come to think God is Catholic. The Serbian Orthodox seem to worship a Serbian god. But the evangelicals there don’t have a tribal religion, they don’t serve an ethnic God.

"Miroslav was born in Croatia and lived in Serbia," observed Kuzmic, who gave Volf his first theological books and founded the Pentecostal seminary Volf later attended. "His father was half-German, his mother was part of the Czech minority. He refused to buy into ethnoreligious homogenization.

"In a modest way, we Pentecostals became involved in what I call a ministry of reconciliation. So evangelicals there are not viewed, as they are here, as a rightist provincial group.

Volf has the catholicity of a refugee. He’s reluctant to join any camp -- military, ethnic or intellectual. His books are a conversation among diverse voices: postmodernists like Gilles Deleuze, feminists like Julia Kristeva, Anabaptists like John Howard Yoder, liberation theologians like Gustavo Gutiérrez, and political philosophers like John Rawls and Seyla Benhabib.

"He is eclectic," says Michael Horton, a Reformed evangelical who teaches at Westminster Theological Seminary in California. "And in an age that is suspicious of systematization, his eclectic borrowing from different traditions gives him certain advantages over more traditional ‘school’ theologians. He was raised Pentecostal, but he’s critical of Pentecostal ecclesiology. He’s clearly not a Calvinist. but certain themes of Reformed theology echo in his work."

In his first book, Work in the Spirits Toward a Theology of Work (1991), Volf argues that the Lutheran and Calvinist notion of vocation is not adequate in our time. Luther’s idea of an earthly calling to complement one’s religious calling fails because people frequently hate the work they do, are often exploited, and nowadays change jobs every few years. People are often underpaid. The global market’s race to offer the lowest wage drags children to assembly lines. Luther has no good answers to these problems, Volf contends. Luther’s "understanding of work as vocation is indifferent toward alienation in work. . . . Hence it seems that virtually every type of work can be a vocation, no matter how dehumanizing it might be." Christians, according to Volf, should not accept this dehumanizing reality.

Volf proceeds from the insight of his graduate school mentor, Jürgen Moltmann, that Christian faith is insistently eschatological and therefore always concerned with new creation. "And the Spirit of God should determine the whole life, spiritual as well as secular, of a Christian," Volf writes. "Christian work must, therefore, be done under the inspiration of the Spirit and in the light of the new creation." If we are called to participate in the eschaton, then we must not be alienated from that world to come -- for who we are in this world has some bearing on who we’ll be in the next. Rather than allow for vocations that leave us miserable and dejected, we ought to look for work that honors the world to come by honoring our place in it. We have a religious duty to find work that fulfills us.

Using language he learned as a Pentecostal, Volf suggests that such work be thought of not as vocation but as a charism, or gift. According to this pneumatological or Spirit-defined theology of work, the Spirit ensures that "the results of the cumulative work of human beings have intrinsic value and gain ultimate significance, for they are related to the eschatological new creation. We are not meant to suffer in our jobs, waiting for heaven to deliver us, and we can’t allow that fate for others, either. God has given us certain gifts that, if properly used, will help us flourish in the new creation, rather than just bide time until that world comes.

Volf’s theology of work, understood as defined by the Holy Spirit, is part of a larger trinitarian project. In his most recent book, After Our Likeness: The Church in the Image of the Trinity (1998), Volf quarrels with Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox theologies of the Trinity, taking two leading theologians, the Catholic Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and the Orthodox Metropolitan John Zizioulas, as his interlocutors. By interrogating their visions of how the Trinity corresponds to the church on earth, Volf arrives at his own, one that honors the Protestant "free church" congregational tradition.

Ratzinger and Zizioulas each emphasize the unity of the Trinity, downplaying its three diverse parts. By analogy, they each see local congregations as inferior in meaning to the church as a whole. Volf, by contrast, describes a Trinity that resembles a community of equals: the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are locked in an embrace of dependence.

"In their mutual giving and receiving," he writes, "the trinitarian persons are not only interdependent, but also mutually internal, something to which the Johannine Jesus repeatedly refers; ‘so that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father."’

This mutual interiority, according to Volf, should lead us to valorize the local congregation -- which, not coincidentally, is the place where individual Christians’ gifts can shine: "Relations between charismata, modeled after the Trinity, are reciprocal and symmetrical; all members of the church have charismata, and all are to engage their charismata for the good of all others." This happens best not in a cloistered order, nor in service to an imperious hierarch, but in the small, gathered community of Christians -- where two or three are gathered in Jesus’ name.

This vision of the church eschews priesthood. Offices in the church "are a particular type of charismata. . . Because the ministry of officeholders involves the entire local church, the charismata of office require reception by the entire congregation, [and] ordination is an act of the entire local church led by the Spirit of God." Volf’s vision unites a Pentecostal theology of gifts with a Catholic emphasis on the Trinity and an Anabaptist preference for small, nomic communities.

Volf begins his most popular book, Exclusion and Embrace (1996), with a question that has become rather famous in theological circles. It was posed by Jürgen Moltmann, who after hearing Volf speak at a conference asked: "But can you embrace a cetnik?"

"It was the winter of 1993" Volf writes. "For months . . . the notorious Serbian fighters called cetnik had been sowing desolation in my native country, herding people into concentration camps, raping women, burning down churches, and destroying cities. I had just argued that we ought to embrace our enemies as God has embraced us in Christ. Can I embrace a cetnik -- the ultimate other, so to speak, the evil other?"

Exclusion and Embrace is Volf’s way of answering yes.

The metaphor of embrace describes two people who can ultimately separate but who are, for the moment at least, dependent on each other, each holding and leaning on the other. "I suggest a complex notion of identity where the self is inhabited by the other," Volf says. "So one needs to maintain the boundaries of the self, but also keep the boundaries porous. Fundamentalism is a hardening of the boundaries. I want to keep them porous.

For the Croat, this means acknowledging that his Croatian identity is formed against the Serb. "I tease non-Croatians, ‘To be a Croat is to have a certain relationship with Serbs."’ And, in a similar way, "To be a white American is to relate to the blacks."

The concepts of justice and forgiveness, which govern the typical Christian response to violence, neglect this aspect of mutuality. Bringing the Serb to justice -- jailing him, perhaps killing him -- is unsatisfactory, as is forgiving him; for in each case, the Serb remains an alien other. To embrace the Serb is to recognize that, as in the Trinity, human beings comprise multiple identities, none of which can be extracted from the whole. And so embrace becomes a matter of both Christian charity and self-respect: "If you think of yourself as apart," Volf told me, "you do violence to yourself and others."

Volf is embarking on two new projects. The first is "Faith as a Way of Life," a project funded by a $1.5 million grant from the Lilly Endowment. It is designed, in the language of the grant proposal, to enable pastors "to achieve excellence in helping mediate faith as away of life in contemporary cultures, through a collaborative initiative involving working pastors, academic theologians, and laypeople."

In other words, Volf wants to help make better, more faithful pastors. He believes that weak theological education -- either lacking in rigor or rigorous but too theoretical -- has conspired with the demands of the church marketplace to turn pastors into either psychologists, helping people cope but without deepening their Christianity, or salesmen, so desperate to grow a church that they forget that ministry’s "primary function is to help make faith a way of life for persons, communities and cultures."

Perhaps because Volf has been an evangelist, he takes a greater interest in the state of ministry than do many of his professorial colleagues. And he is a tough critic. He left the Pentecostal movement, he says, "in flight from bad preaching. My sense was I just wasn’t getting the gospel in the church I was visiting. I think preachers want to mediate between faith and the contemporary situation, but I felt the substance of faith was dribbling away. I didn’t need to go to church to be psychologized or given second-rate social theories. I can chill out on my deck with a cup of coffee and the New York Times for that. So I sought comfort in the Book of Common Prayer seven years ago.

Volf admits that some people may best connect to their faith via comparisons with politics or the theories of Freud, but "that’s just not me," he says. "There are extraordinary preachers, but I think preachers don’t take enough time to prepare their sermons, and I think in many cases they have lost faith in faith."

Like Kuzmic, Volf goes back to Croatia every year to teach (though only for several weeks, while Kuzmic spends half the school year there). These trips are, perhaps, part of his own pastoral work. His regular "Faith Matters" column for the CHRISTIAN CENTURY often takes a personal, pastoral tone (he will write about his two adopted children, for example). Reading his columns, or listening to him describe speaking at the United Nations prayer breakfast as the World Trade Center was collapsing, one understands how central is Volf’s desire to have an audience, to have a flock, to resist the cloistering effect of a university professorship.

But Volf would never abandon the academy, which was his escape from the intellectually narrow world of a preacher’s kid. Volf’s next academic project, a theological investigation of memory and forgetting, arises from his dissatisfaction with the centrality of the category of justice in recent theology.

"You need modes of love that go beyond the demands of justice," Volf says. "As Hannah Arendt said, time doesn’t run backwards -- somebody has been raped, and you need something more than justice, which you may not get. You need grace, or forgiveness.

"My new book is on the question of memory. My question is, How do those who love remember, especially the injustices that others have done them, or the guilt that they have incurred? Memories can be both a shield and a sword. They are ambiguous. Conflicts around the world are motivated by certain readings of the past. So how does one remember so as to heal wounds rather than deepen them?

"We may need ‘eschatological forgetting.’ To forgive is to forget. Augustine, at the end of City of God, says that he will remember certain evils -- the ones he has committed, not the ones he has forgiven others for."

Starting with John Locke, Volf says, the West has defined the self by what one remembers. That has been the stable feature of modernity, that we are what our stories are. This means that memories of evil often organize our lives.

"But is that desirable for a world of perfect love?" Volf asks. "Only those who are willing not to remember certain things can remember themselves into the telos of perfect love." Volf does not use the term "forgetting"; his vision is of a messianic age so ennobled by joy, love and embrace of the neighbor that there will be a "not-coming-to-mind," a leave-taking of worldly memories. This, he suggests, is what is meant by Nehemiah’s promise of "the joy of Jerusalem." While that day will come only with Jesus’ return, we can, in the meantime, strive to approximate that not-coming-to-mind of memories that would provoke anger or aggravate violence.

If Volf challenges the power of human differences, he can never forget them. Growing up a Pentecostal in an atheist country, Volf was taunted by classmates. As a college student, he played guitar and sang lead vocals for a Christian band. In one town, the band members were assaulted by a gang of young communists, who beat them up and slashed their van’s tires. He came to the U.S. and thence to Germany -- a foreigner in both places. Between getting a master’s degree at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, and studying for a doctorate in Tübingen, Germany, he returned to Yugoslavia to serve in the army. His experience there was chilling.

"The whole unit was organized around spying on me . . . I knew there’d be spies, but I wasn’t prepared for the extent. The room where I worked was bugged. There was a thick file collected on me. Photos were taken of me from high places. They gathered people I knew and placed them all over my unit to create trust.

"After three or four months, there was a period of interrogation. They’d come any time of day or night and wake me up. They’d threaten to try me for treason. Eight years of prison was always hanging over my head."

That experience seems mild, of course, in light of what was to come -- the destruction of Croatian towns, the murder of friends and countrymen. The search for reconciliation after the war, amid charges and countercharges -- "But the Croats allied with the Nazis to kill Serbs! These are their just desserts!" -- has made Volf suspicious of the easy polarities of American culture. Volf appreciates American freedom, and he likes American culture. On this matter, he disagrees with smug anti-Americanism on both the left and the right.

Says Michael Horton: "He has very strong convictions, which he writes about with great passion. That reflects the suffering he has endured. So much American theology is trite, boring, optimistic. He really believes something, and is willing to defend it as true in the ultimate sense."

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Volf’s career as a theologian is that there are no fights between Volfians and anti-Volfians. There don’t even seem to be any anti-Volfians.

"I have never heard of a bad review," said Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, the school Volf left in 2000 when he accepted a position at Yale Divinity School. "This is very interesting, because even people who are much celebrated get bad reviews. He seems to be universally appreciated. Why is that? Maybe because people know about his background; his is such a rare voice that no one wants to exclude him from the conversation."

Mouw recalled a recent conference at Wheaton College that included Volf and a diverse group of other scholars. At one point Volf said in answer to a question, "Well, of course I believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ -- he will return."

"If he had come from Fuller Seminary," Mouw reflected, "and been up there with a postmodern Jewish thinker and people reading Derrida and Levinas, and had said, ‘I believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ’ -- well, you know how people would have perceived it. But to come from Yale and say that -- it had a whole power to it.

"I have always regretted his leaving Fuller," said Mouw. "But at the Wheaton meeting I had this kind of ah-ha experience. I thought, ‘Thank God he is at Yale."’

By combining elements that mainline churches and divinity schools often only aspire to bring together, Volf is a rare contemporary theologian. He joins impressive scholarship with an unembarrassed expression of Christian faith and attachment to the church, and he draws on both his faith and scholarship to address, in distinctively theological ways. the evils of our time.