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Social Insecurity

One of the greatest fruits of high productivity and rising incomes in a country like the U.S. is the financial ability people have to retire. This possibility was beyond the imagination of pre-World War II workers and is still far beyond the expectations of most people living in Third World countries. For most of human history, people simply worked until their bodies gave out and then depended on their children to care for them in the last years of life. Now, in advanced economies, retirement figures into almost everyone’s expectations.

However, an expectation does not by itself create an adequate financial base for retirement, especially when the expectation is based--as it is in the U.S.--on substantial Social Security benefits. The fact that Social Security is in trouble has been trumpeted for more than a decade, but still no major reforms have been introduced to put things right. Because all potential reforms involve costs, politicians have deferred the necessary difficult decisions.

Social Security needs to be thought of in the larger context of retirement. Retirement is never a right. It is possible only through the fruit of productive labor, sacrificial saving, effective investment and responsible budgeting. Retirement depends on the willingness of families to routinely make sacrifices, setting aside some portion of their current income. Retirement also depends on firms using these savings to fund investment in new production facilities, better equipment, and research and development. The link between saving (by both governments and families) and retirement income is key to both a healthy economy and its ability to provide for senior citizens.

The connection between saving and retirement earnings is most obvious for those who contribute to Individual Retirement Accounts. It is visible also to those who work in companies that provide pensions for which employee contributions are required.

The danger of delinking retirement income from saving is that families come to count on a certain future retirement (as with retirement plans that promise a specific benefit) and therefore tend to save less themselves. This has consequences both for the individual and the economy. For individuals, inadequate saving can make retirement difficult, if not impossible, should expectations about future benefits not be met. For the economy as a whole, less saving by individuals means slower growth in productivity. And slower growth in productivity means that there will be less growth in invested funds and so, in turn, less money available to fund retirement.

Even more dangerous to society is the disconnect that has arisen between the government’s promises of Social Security benefits and its own commitment to save to provide these benefits. This weakness was built into the system from its inception in 1935. Originally, benefits paid to current retirees were to be funded exclusively from modest payroll taxes (1 percent of the first $3,000 earned) paid by both current employees and their employers. The initial beneficiaries of Social Security made no financial contributions into the system. During the first ten years of the system, the ratio of workers paying Social Security taxes to beneficiaries was more than 40 to 1. Given Depression rates of unemployment and the poverty conditions that prevailed, a commitment of benefits to the limited number of people who survived past the age of 65 seemed like the least society could do to help older workers and to honor their contributions.

Over the years, Social Security benefits have increased, as have the contributions required of workers. The tax rate for 2007 was 6.2 percent (this does not include the 1.45 percent tax rate paid for Medicare) on the first $97,500 of earnings, with this amount paid by both employees and employers. Benefits are now automatically adjusted yearly to offset the effect of inflation.

But demographic changes have rendered the Social Security system unsustainable in its current form. One important factor is the aging of the generation born between 1946 and 1964. In 2008 the first baby boomers can start retiring--at age 62--and receive partial benefits from Social Security. The baby boomers head into retirement at a time when birth rates have dropped--from 16.7 births per 1,000 people in 1990 to 14.2 births in 2007. In addition, life expectancy has increased over the past 40 years from an average of 70.8 years in 1970 to a projected lifespan of 78.5 years in 2010.

Because of these demographic changes, the number of workers for each beneficiary dropped from 5.1 in 1960 to 3.3 in 2006. This ratio is expected to decrease to 2.1 by 2030 and to 1.8 by 2080. As a result, the Social Security system faces serious funding shortfalls beginning around 2018 and continuing into the indefinite future. Given the huge gap between Medicare’s current promises to seniors and its basis of funding, the future of retirement for the next generations is even bleaker.

How did we get into this fix? One reason is that people began to think of retirement funding as a right and primarily a public responsibility, and so--not surprisingly--started saving less. For more than a decade, American firms have been funding more and more of their capital investments-the key to economic growth--with money from foreign investors: Foreigners’ willingness to place their savings in the U.S. is good for the U.S. economy in some ways, but it means that an increasing share of the fruits of economic growth goes to the foreign investors and are not available for funding the retirements of American workers.

Social Security taxes and benefit levels are not based on expected rates of return and risk levels for various savings instruments (as is the case in private savings portfolios). In fact, there is nothing in your Social Security portfolio. The federal government’s excess revenues from Social Security receipts (since Social Security receipts are currently greater than expenditures) are not saved but instead are reallocated to fund other government programs. Meanwhile, the Social Security system continues to promise future benefits. These benefits are thus essentially IOUs from the federal government that must be paid in the future either by higher taxes or by further government borrowing.

The obvious and growing gap between Social Security’s commitments and its expected future revenues means that Social Security should no longer be regarded as a risk-less source of retirement income. In a poll taken by the New York Times in 2005, more than half of the respondents said they did not believe that the Social Security system will have the money to provide the promised benefits when they retire. It is common knowledge among economists, and politicians who are willing to look at the facts, that reforms are necessary. They must include some combination of smaller increases in benefits, higher payroll taxes and delayed retirement.

Such reforms can strengthen the financial position of the Social Security system, but they will do nothing to address the perverse incentives that the system generates. The powerful channels of individual responsibility are weakened when people are forced to "save" out of current income--through payroll taxes--but leave it to legislators with very short-term horizons to make decisions about retirement fund money.

Senior citizens are understandably tempted to pressure Congress to expand current Social Security benefits and to delay reforms, since the burden will be borne by another generation. Would these seniors have been willing to impose this burden on the next generation if it was obviously a direct burden on each of their own children? Not likely. Instead, they would probably have increased their personal savings to avoid becoming dependent for their retirement on their children’s earnings.

However, whole generations have been led to believe that they are actually paying in Social Security taxes all that is needed to fully fund their future Social Security benefits. As a result, current retirees vote to maintain the right to receive benefits exceeding what they paid in, and beyond what the system can sustain.

It is precisely for these reasons that several proposals have been made to create personal savings accounts (a partial privatization of the system) whereby individual retirement incomes are linked to efforts to save. A middle-of-the-road proposal of this sort would take a portion of what is now collected as Social Security taxes and allocate them to personal retirement accounts, invested in a limited number of stock and bond instruments. The options would offer various risk/return values, and would be subject to government regulation. Individuals could choose the mix of risk to meet their own needs and values. Some, perhaps a majority, of Social Security taxes would continue to be collected to provide baseline retirement incomes to all workers.

Reforms such as higher taxes, lower benefits and delayed retirement are designed to put Social Security on a firm financial footing, so that the sheer passage of time does not force future payees and retirees into a crisis that would severely hurt both groups. Proposals to create personal savings accounts (PSAs), on the other hand, are designed to counter expectations that Social Security can be the primary source of retirement income. Because workers have the ability to choose the PSA portfolios that best fit their own circumstances, nobody will be led to believe that society owes them a retirement income. This design has operated successfully in a number of countries. In Chile, for example, national savings rates increased from 10 percent in 1986 to 29 percent in 1996.

It is true that investing in stocks involves risk, as evidenced by the ups and downs of the major stock market indexes. However, letting politicians with short-term time horizons decide on Social Security benefits is also a risky proposition. Currently, individuals have no ownership over their future Social Security benefits, and the level of benefits can be changed by Congress at any time. For example, benefits were decreased in 1977, and in 1983 some Social Security benefits became taxable income, which effectively reduced their value.

Historically, rates of return on common stocks have been significantly higher than the rate of return on government bonds that are bought by the Trust Fund operated by Social Security (using the current surplus of Social Security payroll tax receipts over benefits paid out). Over the 50-year period from 1955 to 2004, a dollar invested in stocks would have generated more than ten times more purchasing power than a dollar invested in Treasury bills held by the Trust Fund. The transition to private savings accounts would involve substantial financial costs, but so would any of the potential reforms of the Social Security system.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid could represent 75 percent of the federal government’s budget by 2030, up from around 40 percent in 2005. The projected ballooning of the federal deficit, largely due to underfunded Medicare and Social Security benefits, should focus the minds of citizens. A government operating such a deficit at a time when an increasing share of the nation’s debt is held by foreigners is effectively concealing from the public the real nature of future burdens.

If foreigners become reluctant to buy U.S. government bonds and to invest in the U.S. (perhaps because other regions of the world show more economic promise), then the burden of the deficit will become obvious in terms of rising interest rates that affect all Americans. This will lead to a lower standard of living for average households, which are now net borrowers (with near zero overall savings rates). Higher interest rates will also reduce home ownership rates among low-income American families. Furthermore, if investment rates in the U.S. fall (as a result of decreases in investment by foreigners and rising budget deficits), the result will be slower growth in American productivity, which jeopardizes both near-term and long-distant future earnings. Again, those most disadvantaged by slow economic growth are poor families.

Alternatively, a drop in the willingness of foreigners to invest in the U.S. economy could cause the value of the U.S. dollar to fall (economists believe this partially explains the falling dollar--relative to the Euro and yen--during 2007). A falling dollar brings about higher import costs for businesses that import foreign resources and parts, and higher prices for consumers of imports and items made with imports.

Whether inflation rises or the Federal Reserve Bank uses its power over interest rates to limit the potential inflationary impact of the falling dollar, the ultimate outcome of our recent overdependence on foreign saving will be a lower standard of living (or slower increases in living standards), such that decent levels of retirement income (private and public) cannot be maintained. In addition to slower growth, the downturn in foreign savings coming into Treasury bonds and the U.S. economy also means that the current U.S. budget deficit is unsustainable. This increases the urgency of reducing the imbalance between Social Security revenues and outlays.

As stated previously, retirement is not a right. Its funding cannot be assured apart from rising U.S. productivity and greater fiscal responsibility. Neither Social Security reform nor partial privatization will come without cost. Both current and future generations must share these costs in a way that does not overburden particular cohorts. A fair approach to reform would include these features:

1. Maintaining benefit levels paid to soon-to-be and current retirees, because they have little or no earning lifetime left to save and invest for their retirement needs.

2. Lowering over time the net benefit increases promised to current and future retirees. This move usually includes reducing the inflation index by which the benefits are adjusted upward and making a greater share of benefits taxable.

3. Introducing progressive indexing to provide greater cost of living adjustments for the poorest retirees and less for others.

4. Raising the age of eligibility for Social Security benefits to reflect increased years of health and productivity.

5. Raising the income cap on Social Security tax payments (above the 2007 level of $97,500).

These proposals have the virtue of introducing changes slowly and diffusely enough so that families can adjust their earning, spending and saving patterns. Their expectations will be better founded than they could ever be if government were to continue promising the impossible.

Several of the above proposed reforms also preserve one of the key objectives of Social Security: to ensure that even people with low earnings are able to retire with adequate benefits. To achieve this goal, higher-income workers already receive a lower return on the taxes that they pay than do lower income families. Raising the income cap would increase the existing progressivity of the system, as would applying greater cost-of-living benefit adjustments for families with lower earnings than to those with high earnings. Providing adequate retirement benefits to retirees whose lifetime earnings are low is clearly a matter of intergenerational justice.

By themselves, the sorts of reforms described above are not likely to fully solve the funding crisis that faces Social Security. In addition, they will do little to increase incentives for personal saving, which is ultimately needed to fund long-term economic growth and decent retirement incomes for future generations.

As noted earlier, the advantage of introducing individual retirement accounts into the picture is to partially repair the present disconnect between individuals’ savings and the political decisions about their eventual Social Security benefits. By itself, such a change would have the effect of calling Americans’ attention to the fact that a retirement livelihood can never be just a promise. It requires saving. It demands that everyone become active in providing for his or her retirement through productive work, sacrificial saving--and limited expectations of what can be demanded of government.

Citizens who care about justice for future generations should demand answers on Social Security reform from the presidential candidates. The concerted effort needed for reform requires transcending party politics. We should be skeptical about candidates promising palatable short-term fixes that are aimed at attracting our votes. The long-term costs of that sort of politics will be enormous.

The Urge to Travel (Genesis 12:1-4; Psalm, 121)

The urge to travel is in Abraham’s genes. According to Genesis 11, his father, Terah, uprooted the family from the southern Mesopotamian town of Ur and headed north to Haran. He intended to lead the family all the way to Canaan, but when he died in Haran a portion of the family settled there. Abram hears the voice of YHWH speaking to him, telling him that for his own sake he must leave three things: his land, his birthplace and the house of his father.

In ancient times, it was unusual for the firstborn to leave. The pattern was for a younger son (Jacob, Joseph) to go while the firstborn son stayed home, charged with care of aging parents and unmarried younger siblings. That is why the reader is told that Abram’s father died, a brother died, and another brother is married and therefore an adult. Abram can leave with his integrity intact. One assumes that Abram’s mother died before her husband. It would have been enough to instruct Abram to go to another place or to fulfill the dream of his father by reaching Canaan and settling there. Instead there is that threefold statement of what Abram is to leave behind.

In ancient societies, place and relationships were the most important considerations. One’s home and network of family and friends provided support and a means of earning a living. Without the political and economic structures that are in place today, travel beyond one’s homeland was difficult and dangerous; there were no rules that one could count on and no embassy to call if one got into trouble. In more recent times, people often leave bad situations--war; famine; political, economic, social or religious oppression--and go to a place where they hope their lives will be better.

Interestingly enough, Abram is not promised that life will be better in Canaan. He is told that his name will become great, that he will be made into a great people (goy) and that he will be a blessing, but not that he will be materially better off. Actually it’s almost guaranteed that at first--when he’s left behind his known language of communication, his reputation, his kin network, his knowledge of a place and how to survive in it--life will be worse.

Abram is being called to father a new way of thinking, a new religious expression and a new people. He’s told to leave behind land, birthplace and the house of his father--all the things that make it difficult to do something new--because otherwise he can too easily say, "But this is the way we have always done it." Perhaps a new perspective will emerge only if he is exposed to a new environment in which old patterns no longer work.

The growth of denominations, congregations and independent churches that have muted or even severed their original denominational ties may represent a desire of some believers to have a say in the life of their religious institutions. Some want to envision God and spiritual life differently and get away from "This is the way we have always done it" thinking.

These churches are usually full of young and early-middle-aged adults, some of whom feel alienated from their congregations and denominations of origin because they "were not heard," or were denied leadership opportunities, or were discouraged when innovations that they proposed were rejected. This has been particularly true of the young, of women and of people from racially, ethnically and linguistically diverse communities. Denominations make utopian statements about their openness to all, but the lived reality is different.

It is easy to blame the inherent sinfulness of people, the desire to hold on to power and the unwillingness of people to change. This is at least partially because people have spent their whole lives learning about how the society in which they live functions--including the church--and how to find a place for themselves in it. They were told growing up that "this is the way to behave in church… this is the kind of music that is acceptable in church… this is the way the church is organized." Then those same churches (denominations) tell them that what the churches said in the past is not true. This is interpreted as betrayal, not enlightenment.

Some congregations and denominations have not adequately dealt with the resistance to change by educating older people and persuading them that they are still loved and have a place in the church. These congregations have not provided enough opportunities, for younger people and persons representing diversity to have not just a voice but also the power to make new things happen.

The church ought to evolve as its own understanding of the gospel becomes clearer. But it’s hard to change. That’s why some people move away from their spiritual homeland, their spiritual birthplace and the spiritual house of their ancestors.

Performing Scripture

Nicholas Lash, professor at Cambridge University, has been one of the most influential theologians in the English-speaking world for the past generation. His work has helped spur the renewal of confidence among orthodox theologians working in mainline academic settings in the United Kingdom and the U.S. He has engaged philosophers as diverse as Marx and Wittgenstein and drawn on theologians across the spectrum, from Aquinas to liberationists. His own broad reach of interests is reflected in his remark that "to think as a Christian is to try to understand the stellar spaces, the arrangements of micro-organisms and DNA molecules, the history of Tibet, the operation of economic markets, toothache, King Lear, the CIA, and grandma’s cooking--or, as Aquinas put it, "all things" in relation to that uttering, utterance and enactment of God which they express and represent. To act as a Christian is to work with, to alter or, if need be, to endure all things in conformity with that understanding." A Roman Catholic, he likes to point out that the last Roman Catholic who held his chair at Cambridge (back in the 16th century) was beheaded.

You’ve written that "care with language" is the "first casualty of original sin." Can you give some examples of poor word care?

Examples are easy: all laziness, carelessness, cliché. I have often quoted a remark that I heard Gerald O’Collins, the Australian Jesuit, make 40 years ago: "A theologian is someone who watches their language in the presence of God." The church becomes an academy of word care to the extent that people learn that even the most academically demanding and technical theology has to be done, at least metaphorically, on one’s knees, with one’s shoes off.

One of your books is titled Believing Three Ways in One God. Doesn’t this approach to understanding the Trinity fall into what Theology 101 classes teach is the heresy of modalism?

If such classes do teach that, then the teachers should be shot. I will, if I may, quote what I said about modalism in my little book on the Apostles’ Creed, whose title you quote. The heresy of "modalism came in many shapes and sizes, but common to them all was the conviction that, in the God-head, the only differentiations are transitory, episodic, a matter of successive ways (or ‘modes’) of acting or existing. Beneath the play of light and colour, before and after the episode of incarnation, the rock of God endures, unalterable and unmoved. For the modalist, in other words, the three ways we know God are of the nature of appearances, transitory forms, ‘beneath’ which the divine nature, unaffected, stands. God is not an individual with a nature, nor is God an agent acting in three episodes. According to what was, in due time, established as Christian orthodoxy, the distinctions that we draw in our attempts to speak of God go, as it were, to the very heart of the matter. The distinctions between Father, Son and Spirit are distinctions truly drawn of God, and not merely of the way that God appears to us to be, or of the way that for some brief span of time--he was."

By speaking of three "ways" you are trying to steer clear of the language of "persons" in the Godhead. What do you perceive as the danger there?

Tritheism. Nor formally, of course, but, in view of the fact that, in modern English, to be one person is to be an individual; to speak of God as "three persons" seems to imply that God is three individuals. The problem has, I think, two roots. The first is the term person itself, which has profoundly shifted its sense over the centuries. The other we can indicate by asking: is the word God a noun or a verb? Most people, I think, would say" "Obviously, it is a noun." In creatures, identity and operation, being and acting, are distinct. In God, however, there is no such distinction. God is what God does: generating and being generated, breathing and being breathed (to use familiar metaphors). God is, without remainder, the giving that God is, and so on. The classical notion of "subsistent relations" was really an account of what we might call "subsistent operations."

You’ve written, reflecting both on Karl Barth and on Hinduism, about the "end of religion." What are you referring to?

In the Middle Ages, religion was the name of a virtue, a part of justice. Justice was the virtue of giving people and things their due. Religion was the virtue of giving God God’s due. People fail in religion in one of two ways: they either treat some creature or creatures as God, or they treat Cod as a creature.

In the 15th century, as the Latin word religio moved into English, it did so to name communities of men and women whose lives were specifically dedicated to the virtue of religion. What were then called the "religious" of England we would refer to as religious orders. Then, during the 16th and 17th centuries, the word shifted from naming a virtue to naming a set of propositions or beliefs. Finally, and fatally, during the struggles misnamed the Wars of Religion--misnamed because these conflicts were not about religion but about the emergent state, the rules of which were determined to keep church leaders under their control--the word came to name a set of privately held beliefs and practices without direct public or political relevance.

That is the religion that is coming to an end. In a book titled The Beginning and the End of ‘Religion’ I wrote: "Not the beginning or the end of faith, or hope, or charity. Not the beginning or the end of prayer or proclamation, of the duty laid upon ‘all humankind to work for peace, and justice, and the integrity of God’s creation. But the view that ‘religion’ is the name of one particular district which we may inhabit if we feel so inclined, a region of diminishing plausibility and significance, a territory quite distinct from those we know as ‘politics’ and ‘art,’ as ‘science’ and ‘law’ and ‘economics’; this view of things, peculiar to modern Western culture, had a beginning, in the 17th century, and (if ‘post-modern’ means anything at all) is now coming to an end."

You have observed the enormous increase in interest in Aquinas among theologians--including many Protestant ones. To what do you attribute this?

I am not entirely sure. It is important to stress that it is a rediscovery of interest in Aquinas the theologian, as distinct from Aquinas the philosopher.

Here’s my best rough guess: Bernard Lonergan famously characterized the sea change of cognitional strategy which occurred at the dawning of modernity as a shift from the pedagogy of the quaestio to the pedagogy of the thesis: from inquiry to assertion. I think that this needs to be read in the context of Stephen Toulmin’s brilliant rereading of the narrative of the beginnings of modernity in his Cosmopolis. To nay mind, he makes a most persuasive case for the view that modernity’s characteristic preoccupation (Descartes is merely the conventional expression of this) with decontextualized certainty was the expression not of intellectual confidence but of something more like panic. Modern philosophy was a little like fundamentalism in that the characteristic obsession of the rationalist with clarity and decontextualized truth expresses a fear that once you put things in context, once you let contingency back in, cherished verities may crumble.

During the past 50 years, both philosophy and theology have rediscovered more insistently historical and contextual styles and strategies, and this has helped theologians to discover that Aquinas was a permanently exploratory, genuinely interesting thinker.

Once, at an academic conference at which people began banging on, as they so often do, about what a magnificently systematic thinker Aquinas was, I lost my temper and said that whenever I heard people going on about this, I knew one thing: that they had never closely studied Aquinas’s texts. Donald MacKinnon growled in agreement: "Yes, and the same is true of Aristotle."

You’ve also written sympathetically about Marxism. After the collapse of communism, is Marxism still a philosophy that Christians need to engage? Why is it that some viable Christian version of socialism is so difficult to imagine in England and America?

Those who doubt that Christians still need to engage with Marx are as foolish as those who doubt that we still need to engage with Aristotle, Kant or Hegel. At the heart of Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production was his insight that it led, with almost mechanical inevitability, to what he called "the universalization of the commodity form," the transmutation not only of all things, but also of all relations, into commodities. Dr. Marx, si monumentum requiris, circumspice ("If you seek a memorial, look around")--as Sir Christopher Wren’s memorial in St Paul’s Cathedral in London says.

May I risk being a little polemical here, out of friendly exasperation? I can understand why, in a culture as driven and absorbed by messianic capitalism as is the United States, versions of socialism of any kind are hard to comprehend with sympathy. But please do not drag us in with you. There were, as any historian can tell you, the very closest links between 20th-century socialism in Britain and Christianity, especially Nonconformity. In recent decades, the dire and dominant structures of British (and international) capitalism have deformed the Labour Party almost, but not quite, to the extent of losing its originally socialist vision, but we do not find Christian socialism in any way difficult to understand, because we remember it.

As millions of destitute Americans continue to be deprived of adequate access to good health care, people of all parties in the UK regard the retention of the National Health Service, "free at the point of delivery," as essential to our cultural health. And a health service in which wealth or poverty make not the slightest difference is a socialist achievement.

What hope do you see for the future of ecumenism? Is the ecumenical movement something you are invested in?

One can hardly teach theology for 40 years in an interdenominational faculty in a secular university without being heavily involved in ecumenism. If, on the one hand, the goal of full communion between all mainstream Christian denominations seems as far away as ever, I would want to say, on the other, that there is a sense in which fundamental aims of the mid-20th-century ecumenical movement have already been achieved. We now take it for granted that we are not warring armies but--however deep the enduring disagreements--members of a common project of witness and discipleship.

Beyond such vast generalities, one would have to start being specific. For example, where the schism between East and West is concerned, in recent months there has been a discernible thawing of the permafrost around the patriarch of Moscow. But here the patriarch of the West (better known as Benedict XVI) has to be cautious. Move too close to Moscow, and Roman Catholics risk alienating the Patriarchate of Constantinople--whose suspicion of Moscow is hardly entirely unjustified given the extent to which it had become an aspect of the Russian government. And so on, and so on.

None of this, I fear, is very helpful. I’m only really trying to indicate that I do not find generalizations on ecumenical progress illuminating.

You’ve said that interpreting the scriptures is more like performing the script of a play than constructing history from fragmentary evidence. Can you elaborate on this?

If you look back where I first (I think) explored the analogy of performance, in a piece titled "Performing the Scriptures" (first published in 1982, reprinted in a collection called Theology on the Way to Emmaus in 1986), you will see that I contrast the notion of interpretation as performance not with the historian’s craft but with the supposition that a text (any text, although it is with scripture that I am most concerned)--a set of black marks on white paper--tells you how to take it, without any interpretative labor on the reader’s part, a labor for which the reader must take personal responsibility.

The emphasis on responsibility is emphatically not an encouragement to individualism--to myths of "my" meaning of scripture or of any other text. Hence the analogies I draw between the interpretation of scripture and the performance of musical scores and dramatic scripts.

Insisting that the whole of Christian living consists, in this sense, in the enactment, or interpretative performance, of scripture, I drew an analogy at one point between the Bible and the U.S. Constitution. "The fundamental form of the political interpretation of the American Constitution is the life, activity and organization of American society.… Similarly, we might say that the scriptures are the ‘constitution’ of the Church."

You were famous at Cambridge for distributing "lashings," that is, for assigning papers to be read aloud in seminar and praised or criticized by you. Could you explain your pedagogical purposes? Is the Socratic method important in teaching theology?

I suspect the hand of my good friend Paul Murray, who in January this year had a piece in New Blackfriars titled "Theology ‘Under the Lash’: Theology as Idolatry Critique in the Work of Nicholas Lash" with the perhaps distracting pun on my name. The impression of pedagogic ferocity would hardly arise if my name were Muggins!

In Cambridge, in a good old-fashioned, slightly Teutonic tradition, senior professors have "their" seminar. I inherited mine from Donald MacKinnon, and it had been established as a professorial seminar in philosophical theology several decades earlier. It would meet fortnightly, attended by doctoral students and colleagues from my own and cognate faculties.

I have no idea how I teach--I am as baffled as St. Augustine was as to how this thing works. Someone once defined a university as a library with people inside who help you to find your way around. Fair enough, but that is surely less than half the story. Where education is concerned, few things are more important than helping people to think, and to think responsibly, critically and creatively.

What do you make of the theology of Benedict XVI and its relation to the subjects you’ve worked on: theological language, ecumenism, eschatology and so on?

I am not sure that there is an easily identified entity that amounts to "the theology of Joseph Ratzinger" in quite the same sense that there are entities known as "the theology of" Karl Barth or Karl Rahner, and I say this knowing full well that on a shelf beside me is an excellent volume by Aidan Nichols titled The Theology of Joseph Ratzinger: An Introductory Study. If I am right about the distinction for which I am feeling here, then although the enduring influence of his mind-set is more or less ensured since he became pope, his writings might slip from view.

I say this not as criticism but as a way of locating him. He is an excellent theologian, but not quite up there in the top echelon alongside (to name roughly contemporary Catholics) Rahner or Yves Congar. (I do not mention Hans urs yon Balthasar, for all that he is at present very fashionable, because, notwithstanding the power of an extraordinary mind, it seems to me that he lived and thought a little marginally to the life of the church, in marked contrast to Ratzinger, who did his work always at the service of the church.)

In talking of mind-set, I have something like this in mind: He is, never forget, Bavarian, a product of a deeply Catholic culture. He has a very strong sense of the distinctiveness of Christianity as well as a deeply pessimistic view of contemporary Western culture. I sometimes have the impression that, as a result, he would not be too unhappy if Christianity "pulled up its skirts" a little from the muddiness of the road, as it were, and contracted into a little flock. If he were still Professor Ratzinger, that is one view of where we are--one which would interact with others. But he is now pope--and this view, as a strategic vision, is somewhat disturbing.

If you could preach this Sunday on any text and topic, what would you choose and what would you say?

It would depend upon what the scripture readings for the Sunday were and what was on the news.

How do yon interpret John 14:6 to a secular, post-Christian culture?

Leaving aside the fact that, like the Brazilian Dominican and friend of Castro, Frei Betto, I believe British culture to be more accurately described as pagan than as secular, I don’t think that the way that I have learned to understand that verse is dependent on particular circumstances. Rahner’s notion of "anonymous Christians" is regularly misinterpreted by those who suppose him to be patronizing or colonizing people who, quite obviously, are not Christians at all. But Rahner was a theologian, not a sociologist. He knew that if every human being, past, present and future, receives in one form or another God’s offer of salvation and eternal life; and if the enfleshed Word that Jesus is is, as the prologue to the fourth Gospel tells us, the Word that was in the beginning, through whom all things are made; and if the life inbreathed in us is the one breathing, one life-giving, one Spirit that God is; then it follows that no one comes to the Father except in the Spirit through the hearing of the one Word that God is.

Who Owns the Holy Land?

In recent years, certain religious Jewish and Christian communities have proclaimed that exclusive Jewish sovereignty over the Holy Land is a theological fight and necessity, a condition for the unfolding of the messianic era. This view has been exploited by some secular Israelis, who for political reasons--linked to concerns about security or the war on terrorism--seek to maximize territorial control of the land. Although Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert's new convergence plan acknowledges the immorality and implausibility of the exclusivist position, in opting for unilateral action it still ignores the rights of those families whose land was expropriated for reasons having nothing to do with security.

The Israeli left has made its case for sharing the Holy Land largely by appealing to moral conscience, political liberalism, and pluralism. These claims have merit, but they are too easily drowned out by the ferocity of the theologically driven agenda of the religious right, both Jewish and Christian.

I do not propose a solution to the complex problem of how the Holy Land is to be shared, but I do want to suggest that those who are concerned with the religious nature of this conflict should explore an alternative theological model, one that played a part in an earlier chapter of Zionism.

For decades before the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 and for a few decades afterward (until the Six-Day War silenced much of the religious/spiritual left up to the late 1970s), Jewish theologians argued that dividing or sharing the Holy Land was a religious precept. The most well known of these figures was Martin Buber, who before 1948 called for a binational state of Jews and Arabs and after 1948 fought for the repatriation of Arab refugees.

In his essay "Zion and the Other National Concepts" Buber notes the significance of the choice of the term Zionism to define the modern movement that brought Jews to Erez Israel. Zion refers not to a people but rather to a unique place that is God's alone. ("The Lord is great and much acclaimed in the city of our God, His holy mountain, fair-crested, joy of all the earth"--Ps. 48:3.) Thus Zionism, an ostensibly secular political movement, was imbued with religious significance from the outset.

What is the nature of this religious significance? Buber suggests that the essential consequence of the term Zionism is that the Jews are caretakers rather than owners of the Holy Land. "This land was in no time in the history of Israel simply the property of the people; it was always at the same time a challenge to make of it what God intended to have made of it." The idea of Israel as caretaker is made explicit in the Bible. Speaking about the sabbatical year, God warns the Israelites, "But the land must not be sold beyond reclaim, for the land is mine; you are but strangers resident with me" (Lev. 25:23). The biblical concept of the jubilee year (Lev. 25:10-18) affirms that no one can own the Holy Land in perpetuity other than God.

Buber argues that Zionism is, or can be, a unique national movement precisely because it is based not on national "rights" or a myth of origins, but on dwelling in a land that belongs to no one people precisely because it belongs to God. Israel's mission as caretaker is to make that land a place that mirrors its owner, thereby making those who dwell on it a people who reflect the divine. In regard to the biblical phrase "for the land is mine" (Lev. 25:23), the great 13th-century biblical exegete Moses Nahmanides interprets the passage as saying:

"You are but strangers resident with me. It is sufficient for a servant to be like his master. When it is [treated as] mine it will be yours."

In short, dwelling in the land should be--must be--an act of imitatio dei, and, as the Hebrew prophets taught, to fail to embody that religious precept is to forfeit the right to dwell in that sacred place. This is one of the central tenets of the prophetic notion of exile.

Buber contends that the fact that the Holy Land is also inhabited by another people (as it always has been, from biblical to modern times) should not be an obstacle but instead is a challenge to embody that divine call in the modern world. However, the modern return of the Jews to Zion ("his mountain") requires rethinking the divine mission of dwelling in God's land. Calls to annihilate the indigenous population, as in biblical times, are hardly legitimate. (The sin of those indigenous people, by the way, was not inhabiting the land but worshiping other gods in that land.)

In fact, Buber goes on to say, changed conditions "sometimes allow [us] to make amends for lost opportunities in a quite different situation, in a quite different form, and it is significant that this new situation is more contradictory and the new form more difficult to realize than the old, and that each fresh attempt demands an even greater exertion to fulfill the task for such is the hard but not ungracious way of life itself." We should not lament the absence of a divine call to annihilate "the other" but celebrate the progress of the human spirit that enables us to "fulfill the task" with human generosity and a moral conscience.

Morality and generosity are needed on both sides, of course. But to simply forego or nullify the religious precept because the other side has not yet reciprocated is short-sighted and self-serving. It is incumbent upon us to try to cultivate the conscience of the other by example. As the ancient sages teach, "Be a man ('ish) in a place where there are no men."

More needs to be said of this "divine nature" we are commanded to emulate. Relevant here is a comment by Hasidic master Rabbi Jacob Leiner of Izbica in his gloss to the Passover Haggadah. The Haggadah contains numerous rabbinical liturgical inventions coupled with literary (midrashic) renderings of biblical verses, all focused on the story of the Israelite exodus from Egypt. One of the early liturgical flourishes in the Haggadah says: "Blessed be the place (makom), Blessed is He. Blessed be the one who gave Torah to Israel His people."

The use of the term place to describe God is based on a rabbinic midrash from the third century (Genesis Raba, chapter 61). It reads, "Why is it that we use place as a name of God? It is because God is the place of the world but the world is not His place." Rabbi Jacob comments:

This means that God gave a place to all of his creations, even the most lowly, and their existence remains His concern as the Talmud teaches "in the very same place that you find God's greatness you find His humility" (Babylonian Talmud Megillah 31b). No good act or thought by a human being is lost on God--God has a place for all of them. … Yet God first had to create [the idea of] "place" (makom), for if there was no place where would they exist? … This is why God is called "place" because He gives a place for all His creatures.

This concept of place is one that suggests a seeming infinitude of space. As there is never any space void of God, there is never a place that excludes God's creatures. The God who gives the Torah to Israel is the God who creates infinite space for all of creation. The Torah takes up some of that space, but, as it is traditionally viewed as the word of God, the Torah must also have the potential to create space. The creation of space, for oneself and for the stranger in one's midst, is an act of imitatio dei.

One could argue that those who resist sharing the Holy Land are not denying the Palestinians a place, only denying them this place. But who determines whose place is whose in a land where, in the biblical worldview, the sole owner is God? Who determines that this place is my place and, by definition, not your place, even though your people may have lived here for centuries?

In March 1953 the Israeli Knesset passed the Land Acquisition Act, which made it legal for Israel to acquire "absentee properties" (land abandoned by Arabs during the 1948 war, some of whom did not leave voluntarily but were expelled by Israeli forces) and properties belonging to "nonabsentee Arabs" if those properties were needed for security or other "developmental projects." In short, the state took upon itself the right to determine "place" in instances that were not solely related to the security of its citizens.

Buber pressed hard against this move. He pleaded with the government to allow Arabs to return to their lands in the absence of a real security threat, but his plea went unheeded. Buber's argument was based on the promptings of moral conscience, but he was adamant that there is no real distinction between morality and true religiosity in his understanding of Judaism. This is especially true, I would add, when dealing with the fragile and volatile phenomenon of taking care of divine real estate.

This argument presents a challenge to the theological claim by both the settler movement and Christian Zionists that God gave this land to the Jews and thus the Jews have the sole right and authority to determine its status. In fact, that kind of Zionist argument is not a theological one but a secular argument couched in theological language. Its essential claim is that nation-states own their land and thus are its sole proprietors.

The question of whether Israel should be simply a nation-state among others--as was largely the position of Zionism's founder, Theodore Herzl--or something different weaves through the entire history of Zionism. In comments made in 1949 to Israel's first prime minister, David ben-Gurion, Buber said, "I heard one more important thing from the prime minister this evening. He said, 'Not a nation like all the others.' Might not one add, 'Not a state like the rest either'?" States act according to the raison d'état; "they chose the path in which the good of the state seems to lie at that moment, no less and no more." Buber had a different vision (see his "On the Moral Character of Israel").

It may be true that (as the Golda Meier character says in the film Munich) "every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values," but each civilization must constantly reassess those values, weigh the price of that compromise and consider whether in the long term the compromise undermines the very mission the civilization wishes to achieve.

When the theological realm collapses into the political--as it has in the settler ideology of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook and his disciples--the raison d'état is treated as a divine command. When the holiness of the land (a divine proclamation) becomes the holiness of the state (a human creation) we all too easily move in the direction of theocracy veiled as statism (in which the state is the embodiment of divine will). Such a move undermines the very notion of the land as the embodiment of God as "place."

A theological alternative begins with the notion that no people, including the Jewish and Palestinian peoples, has ever owned or can ever own the Holy Land--the land of the One who provides infinite space for his creation. If Israel views itself as caretaker of the land--its divine mission, in Buber's view--whose owner always makes space for those who need it (for those who choose to live with the same inclusive spirit), the religious precept of imitatio dei would require us as Jews to share that space, even the holy city of Jerusalem, to make it a "divine place"--the place "God intended to have made of it."

PowerPointless

Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.

--Edward Tufte

In recent years PowerPoint has become a dominant force in worshiping communities across the theological and liturgical spectrum. In churches smitten with the Microsoft wonder, its power to affect the sensibilities of worshipers and thus to shape congregational identity is almost never discussed.

A tacit assumption is that PowerPoint computer presentations are merely a means to an end, a value-neutral tool used for innocent, perhaps even noble purposes: enlarging text for the hard of seeing; reducing the demand for and thus the production of printed materials; and bringing younger people, who spend much of their lives in front of screens--TV, computer, cell phone, PDA--into worship. But PowerPoint is not value-neutral. As information design analyst Edward Tufte has argued, PowerPoint promotes a kind of cognitive style that routinely disrupts, dominates and trivializes content.

Just as a typical PowerPoint presentation in an IBM boardroom too readily elevates format over content ("chaotic, smarmy and incoherent chartjunk," according to Tufte), PowerPoint in worship reproduces the same "stacking" of information, the relentless sequentiality that divorces content from context, the disposition toward consumption and commercialism, and the ethos of a sales pitch. When the text of a hymn (or, more likely, a "praise song") is projected onto the big screen, it can only be experienced as fragmentary and incoherent. The narrative arc of a great hymn cannot be communicated when only a few lines of text can be accommodated on each of the 30-some frames it takes to display the entire hymn.

And how is it possible for children raised on PowerPoint in worship to learn how to read a hymn? I don't necessarily mean how will they learn to read music (though this is surely a dying practice), but how will they come to know how a hymn on a printed page works?

PowerPoint also conditions worshipers to act and react in visceral ways, so that the character of their bodily actions and emotional responses are at times downright Pavlovian. The screen, not the altar or cross, becomes the all-consuming center of attention, an object of intense fixation which triggers predictable reflexes and behaviors. When PowerPoint malfunctions, for instance, people become nervous and lost; they become conditioned to worry that it will malfunction. They find themselves thinking more about the screen and the technician at the soundboard than about the God whom they've come to worship and the larger worshiping body of which they are a part.

Indeed, PowerPoint makes worshipers less aware of the persons around them; they engage in less eye contact and other forms of human interaction for fear of missing something on the screen. (One might argue that hymnals, prayer books and bulletins potentially create the same sort of isolation or individualism in worship, and it's possible that they do. But the sheer dominating presence of a projection screen in worship works in concert with PowerPoint's client-driven bias to cater rather blatantly to the consumer/customer/individual.)

To use PowerPoint in worship is to unwittingly set up a competition between what's projected on the screen and the human voice doing the preaching, praying or singing. And it's a contest that PowerPoint always wins because, as Richard Lischer has observed, when the brain is asked to listen and watch at the same time, it always quits listening. What PowerPoint enthusiasts see as enhancing the worship experience--projecting pictures of water during a baptism or images of fire and wind on Pentecost--is instead a form of sensory overload that manipulates emotions and stifles imagination. It is difficult to cultivate an awareness and appreciation of ambiguity and mystery in worship when images are projected at strategically timed moments in the liturgy for the purpose of instructing worshipers what to think and feel.

Because PowerPoint has become central to worship in many churches, it is now common to find more technology experts than persons knowledgeable about liturgy involved in planning and leading worship. This is a trend that goes hand in hand with the church's general infatuation with corporate business models--as evidenced in recent years by the invention of a new breed of minister: the executive pastor armed with an M.Div. and an M.B.A. The co-opting of these models and practices is not an innocent borrowing that leaves the inherent assumptions and biases of the corporate world behind.

And so questions beg to be asked. In regard to the increasing use of PowerPoint in churches of all shapes and sizes it is worth pondering: What understanding of the purpose of worship does it assume? What are the personal and communal tendencies it encourages? What sort of culture does it create? What kind of people does it produce? If Christians believe that the church and the worship it offers to God ought in some ways to counter the norms and practices of the surrounding culture, then what does it mean that after spending so much of our time each week in front of computer monitors, cell phones, and sports bar TVs, we come to church on Sunday and happily position ourselves in front of the biggest screen of all?

To be critical of the prevalence of electronic media in worship is not to be nostalgic or wistful for a time when worship was untainted by modern technology. The church at worship is always historically situated and unavoidably shaped by the realities of time, place and culture. (A pipe organ, after all, is a product of technology.) And in case I seem too much the rigid, humorless Luddite, it is important to say that there may be occasions or circumstances when computer-generated visual aids might be used meaningfully in worship. For instance, prior to the start of a service, projecting scripture verses or art appropriate to the day's themes may help to settle and center worshipers, discouraging the chatter and fidgeting that often persist up to the start of the service, and encouraging the whole community's focus on the worship to come. For churches already heavily invested (monetarily and otherwise) in computer technology in worship, moving toward this kind of limited use may be a first step in recognizing the effects of PowerPoint in worship and in generating meaningful conversation.

My aim is not to condemn categorically all uses of technology in worship; that is neither desirable nor possible. But worshipers and worship leaders do need a more sophisticated and thorough understanding of the multiple effects of PowerPoint in worship, and in a great many cases a more judicious and limited use of it is in order.

The first question, then, is not how we can get rid of computers in worship, but, rather, whether we are paying sufficient attention to the ways in which computer technology in worship forms and shapes us. For if faithful Christian discipleship requires that we attend carefully to all aspects of our lives--that we reflect deeply and continually on how we are shaped by what we do (and don't do)--and if we're to resist the easy formulas and shallow pieties that distort and trivialize the church's witness in the world, then ongoing attention to what we do in worship (and how we do it) is vital to such intentional discipleship.

Wonder Bread (John 6:24-35)

It is the day after Jesus fed the 5,000. The picnic is over and Jesus has taken his disciples to the other side of the lake. But the crowds of people who shared the meal with him yesterday and who then tried to turn him into their king are not about to let him go.

We can understand their feelings. After all, Jesus is their meal ticket. In their minds he has the potential to do something unheard of, to lighten the fundamental burdens of life that plague their existence. Who knows what else he can do. If he can provide food, then he just might be able to do the same with shelter and clothing; he can protect them from the never-ending uncertainties of their lives. Who among us would not choose that sort of security? Alter all, in our time so much of our living is dedicated to the illusion that somehow our complete safety can be ensured and that we can be protected against all the ills and evils common to human existence. This delusional pursuit has become an obsession.

Soon the pursuing crowd catches up with Jesus and his entourage on the other side of the lake in Capernaum. There they greet him with a question: "Rabbi, when did you come here?" It sounds innocent enough, somewhat like saying, "Fancy meeting you here." But it means much more. They know something about him, but they want and need to know more. Their question is not limited to temporal time and place; it's a question about ultimate origins. They want to know where he came from and how he came to be. They remind us of a perplexed wine steward who wondered where the new wine had come from, or a woman who asked a visitor for the living water that he kept telling her about.

Judging by what happens next, we might conclude that Jesus would not make it in a "seeker-friendly" church. Although the people have been looking for him for hours and have crossed the lake to find him, Jesus detects an ulterior motive and candidly calls their bluff. "You worked all night to find me," he says, "because I represent a free lunch. You never read the sign; you missed the point completely."

Most of us are afraid to be that forthright. How many times, for example, have I received a person into church membership knowing that there is an underlying agenda and that joining the church is merely a means to some other goal? Or maybe that becoming a church member is an alternative to dealing with a pressing and difficult personal matter. In this case, Jesus takes the risk of doing something more pertinent and more useful than complying with the crowd's misguided agenda.

"I know what you are up to," he tells the crowd. "You came after me because of what happened yesterday when it was time to eat. You ate your fill and now you've come to see if you can exploit the situation. You aren't really interested in knowing who I am. Your question is a facade to cover your true intentions."

In other words, these people have followed Jesus for the wrong reasons. This should not surprise us; today it's still common practice. The Emperor Constantine is still with us, and we follow his historic example of exploiting the cause of Christ. Our culture has made an art of doing the same thing. Our culture has become the consummate expert at casting a pseudo-Christian veneer over its excesses and its shortfalls, its sins of commission and omission and its unexamined patriotism. We use Jesus to garner votes for unqualified leaders whose goals for their constituencies clash with his clear and simple teachings. We invoke his name to bless blatant injustices and immoral policies on a national and international stage.

Jesus will have none of it. He abhors such crass opportunism. In this instance, he doesn't even answer the people's question, but in stead moves the conversation in a new direction.

"The bread you are after," he tells them, "will not last. Yesterday you assuaged your hunger. You ate the bread and now you are hungry again. There is food that perishes and there is food that lasts. God the Father has marked me to provide you the food that endures. So work for that food."

"How do we do that?" they ask. "How do we perform the works of God?"

The answer is disarmingly simple: "This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent."

The people aren't sure they can do that. With the aroma of yesterday's wonder bread still fresh in their nostrils, they have the audacity to ask for a sign. "Prove it," they say, and they recall their ancestors and Moses and the miraculous manna from heaven. Whereupon Jesus reminds them that Moses was not the author of that bread. Rather, it came from "my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven."

In one way or another, each of us is challenged by a personal wilderness: painful loss, physical suffering, financial reverses, betrayal or bereavement. These are roads that we travel not by choice, but by necessity. A Spanish proverb speaks to this condition: "With bread and wine you can walk your road." For us, Jesus is that sustaining bread.

Once more John has started with the literal meaning of a word and ended by having it point beyond itself to something more. The word itself becomes a sign: bread of life and Bread of Life. Then and now it all comes down to the same thing: it's a matter of believing in the one who said, "I am the Bread of Life."

More Than Enough (John 6:1-21)

The church of my youth majored in a miserly view of God's grace. Its message was grim. Life had no edge, no elegance and no joy, but was only a bitter temporal existence largely limited to preparations for the sweet hereafter. Our bleak church building reflected the theology: it was aptly situated in the Pacific Northwest with its endless days of dreary, overcast weather. The clouds and drizzle and fog seemed to cling to our clothes whenever we entered our church for worship. That early religion held no attraction for me, but I was bound to it by the guilt and fear it engendered in me.

All of that changed when a new minister walked into our church. He was winsome, engaging, honest and without guile. One Sunday morning he preached the most important sermon of my life. His text was John 10:10: "I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly." I still remember the message: Christ calls us to a life of fullness, affirmation and joy. In that moment the Word reached out and claimed me.

In the 50 years since that memorable sermon I have been intrigued by a theme from the fourth Gospel, the theme of abundance. It is a constant refrain and it shows up in John 6. We all know the story, but we never tire of telling it.

A crowd of people has followed Jesus to the lakeshore. Their attraction to him is so strong that in their excitement they forget the picnic lunch. Jesus leans over to Philip and says, "Philip, how are we going to buy enough food to feed these people?" It is a test. And Philip, who represents the church, replies the way the church often replies to a crisis: "We're done for. Half a year's wages wouldn't be enough to feed all these people." And then, as Philip continues to mumble, his colleague Andrew informs Jesus that a boy in the crowd is carrying a couple of fish and a few loaves of bread. "But so little as that," says Andrew, "is really quite irrelevant under the circumstances."

I once read a poem that helps me anticipate Christ's response to Andrew on that day:

Be gentle when you touch bread

Let it not lie uncared for--unwanted

So often bread is taken for granted

There is so much beauty in bread

Beauty of sun and soil, beauty of honest toil

Winds and rain have caressed it,

Christ often blessed it

Be gentle when you touch bread.

"There is a boy here who has five barley loaves," Andrew says.

"Make the people sit down," replies the Lord. The meal is blessed, served, then eaten, and--when all are satisfied--there is enough left over to fill 12 baskets. Abundance!

Abundance is a theme throughout the fourth Gospel. In the first chapter John speaks about Jesus as the Word from whose fullness we have all received grace upon grace. Consider the first sign, when water is turned into wine at the wedding in Cana. Jesus instructs the servants to fill some jars with water, and they fill them to the brim. The result is a profusion, not merely of wine, but of good wine. Then, at a community well in Samaria, Jesus tells a woman about living water gushing up to eternal life. Once more, this note of abundance. In the beautiful departure speech in the 14th chapter of John, we hear, "In nay Father's house there are many dwelling places," and at the end of the Gospel, John brings his witness to a close by noting that in addition to the things he has told us, there is so much more that if it were all reduced to writing, there wouldn't be enough space in the world to contain the number of books that would be required.

Whether it is wine at a wedding or rooms for eternity or picnic food, there is always more than enough, a prodigious supply. Wherever we go in John's Gospel we are confronted with this profuse and full-measured flood of God's grace mediated through the Christ. On the basis of John's telling, God's grace is more prodigal than it is miserly.

My own early impressions of a melancholy religion still hold for many in our culture; in fact, it's one reason for the lack of growth in many North American churches. As Nietzsche said, "Christians will have to look more redeemed if people are to believe in their Redeemer." Indeed, people are still drawn to that which nourishes and enriches their lives.

Much of the time our faith mirrors that of Philip and Andrew, who could not see past the six months" wages or the meager five loaves and two fish. We tend to base our living on our own scarcity or even on our own fears of insufficiency. So we hoard and save and worry and end up living life in small and safe measures. We pull back when we should push forward. We give in to our fear of a shortfall rather than exercising faith in God's abundance. But Christians are constantly on call to go places where we have never been, to do things that we have never attempted and to be things we have never envisioned.

John 6 invites us to live into a grace-filled inheritance, a timely calling because most of us tend to live on the edges of what God has to offer. We are challenged to take seriously God's generous offer of life not, of course, so that we might end up being wealthy in this world, but so that we will position ourselves for the adventure of faith that enriches and enlivens those who embrace its challenge.

Sing a New Song

JOHN L. BELL can't keep from singing. When the CENTURY staff recently met with him, he even taught us a song. Bell is a member of the Wild Goose Resource Group, based in Scotland, which is devoted to helping congregations discover and create "new forms of relevant and participative worship."

A minister in the Church of Scotland, a fellow of the Royal School of Church Music and a member of the Iona Community, Bell is a songwriter and song collector who gives workshops throughout the United Kingdom and the United States. He has edited collections of songs and hymns from the world church (distributed by GIA Publications and Iona Books) and written The Singing Thing: A Case for Congregational Singing. He is a past convenor of the Church of Scotland's Panel on Worship and currently directs the committee revising that church's hymnal.

We talked with Bell about the importance of congregational singing and the place of song and music in the life of the church.

You are very passionate about the importance of congregational singing. It seems significant that the church is about the only setting left in our culture in which people sing together.

Yes, the culture of music has gradually moved away from a participative mode. In the 1970s everybody sang songs of the Beatles, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. Since then we've moved toward a performance mode. When new pop songs come out they are accompanied by a video. The presumption is not that you'll sing the chorus but that you'll watch the performer.

The church should be proud of being countercultural; we believe that music is a community activity and that all God's children can and should sing.

Why is congregational singing so important to the life of the church?

First, because everyone can join in doing it. That sense of being a corporate body comes out in the song of the church more than anything else. We are doing something together for God.

Congregational singing is an identity-shaping activity. In the past it was identity-shaping in the sense that Methodists just sang songs by John Wesley and maybe two or three others, while the Presbyterians (in my country at least) would sing only the Psalms, and the Baptists would sing something more lively. We defined our communities by the songs that we sang.

I think we now are in an era in which communities can be reshaped by what we sing. Are we sectarian, denomination-bound Christians or are we universal Christians? The song of the church will tell us that. It will also tell us whether we are male-dominated or whether the body of Christ is made in God's image as much through its female members as its male members. A great deal of our singing has had images of soldiers and warriors, but never of midwives. God blesses midwives in the Bible, but we've never sung, "Midwives of God arise."

The church's song also reminds the world that voices are meant to do other than just talk. A repeated phrase in the Psalms is: Sing to God a new song. The expectation is that this directive applies to everyone, not just the choir or the temple musicians. And in the book of Revelation we read that in heaven the saints and angels are singing a new song. Part of the job of the church is both to be faithful to God's command and to anticipate heaven.

Since you've mentioned the "new song," we have to ask about how you deal with the tension between singing the traditional songs and singing the new ones.

On one hand you have antique collectors who believe that nothing written after Bach is worth bothering about. And on the other hand you have people who are suspicious of anything not created in the past three or four years. That kind of polarity divides the church according to aesthetic taste, and the church was never meant to be divided on that basis.

It's important to recognize that the church has always had different kinds of music. For the past 400 years church music has been shaped by the organ. Now, I love the organ; it's my favorite instrument. But when the monks sang plainchant, they weren't using the organ. When people set music to folk tunes as Luther did after the Reformation, they weren't primarily thinking of organ music. When Ira Sankey wrote gospel music in 19th-century America, he didn't have the organ in mind. But in parts of the church there has been a subconscious effort to try to make everything sound the same, with a resulting loss of integrity.

Since the 1950s, people have been writing music for accompaniment on the guitar. They sometimes say: this is the way all church music should be. Such a stance is as arrogant about the dominance of the guitar as others are about the organ.

One of your critiques of contemporary Christian music is that it emphasizes only one aspect of human experience.

You can look at much new songwriting that has come out of Australia, Europe and the U.S. since the 1960s and not get a sense that Christ was incarnate. The songs talk a lot about enthroning Jesus in our praises. You never get a Christ who argues, who's angry, who deals with women, who heals people. You never get the full story of faith. In the end these songs are debilitating to faith.

Someone once said that congregations that only sing one style of music want only one kind of person.

And if you have only one kind of person, you are able to see only one kind of God.

I recall meeting a musician from El Salvador, William Ramírez, and asking him to teach me a song from his country. He gave me the text in Spanish, which I had translated into English so I could try to fit the English text to the Hispanic tune. When I looked at the words I saw that they were far too political--all about corrupt judges and corrupt courts. Then I discovered it was Psalm 94.

By teaching me that song he opened me to the witness in the Psalms of God's preferential option for the poor and of God's engagement in matters of social justice. Otherwise I would not have known that. I would have sung and read the Psalms as private spiritual nuggets and never have known they had a political and economic dimension.

What other gifts--theological and musical--might we receive from songs being sung in Japan or Peru or Zimbabwe?

If the church in the Northern Hemisphere does not in the next ten years use songs that come from Asia, South America and Africa, it'll be deemed racist. It will be seen as a case of musical apartheid. Most Christians in the world are black and poor. They're not white and affluent. If that's the body of Christ of which we are a member, then we have to share the joy and the pain of fellow members.

Do you have any stories of success in developing this kind of cross-cultural singing?

Years ago I taught Catholic musicians in Texas songs from different parts of the world. About five years later, a director of music in the Catholic Diocese of Austin asked me to come hear some elementary school kids sing. They sang songs in Zulu, Yuribe, Swahili and Spanish. Afterward, one of the teachers told me that students' parents phone to ask: why is it that when there's something in the news about South Africa, my child sings a song from South Africa?

These children are growing up with an awareness of the world, and it's the song of the church which is making them aware of other cultures and of other people. Any school could do that--intertwine music with geography and history and religious studies.

You've said that Christian singing should lead to Christian activity. Do you see evidence of that?

You sing primarily to give a gift to God, but you also sing to shape discipleship. If a song is specific about what it means to be a disciple of Christ in the 21st century, it should lead to a change in the way we behave.

My frustration is that the church's singing is full of churchy words. We don't have songs with a word like economics in them, or a word like kitchen. A substantial amount of biblical witness tells us God is interested in economics. We know that much of Jesus' time was spent in kitchens. But we are disenfranchised from singing about some realities in his and our lives.

This explains why some people find the Celtic tradition very attractive. The poems and prayers that have been passed down through centuries in the Celtic tradition are about milking the cow and taking eggs from the hen and going on a journey. They witness to the fact that God is not circumscribed by the walls of religious sanctuaries and that God is concerned with the processes and activities of daily life. We need to emulate that holistic approach rather than be locked into a Victorian moral and ecclesial mentality.

What would you do if you went into a congregation as a pastor or music director and the congregation just didn't sing?

People have to acknowledge that the church is a singing community--that singing is part of the charter of the church. And then people have to have a good experience of singing.

I can't work miracles, but here's what I did in one church in Belfast that didn't sing well. I said, Well, friends, we're going to begin with singing "Amazing Grace" and we're going to sing it the way our forebears would want us to sing--unaccompanied. On verse one, I'll sing to give you the key. On verse two, we'll all sing. On verse three, we'll harmonize--just do it whenever you like. And verse four we'll sing in canon. People were beginning to palpitate at the thought of singing without the organ. But we sang it, and it was lovely. And people discovered their voices.

Most musicians have been trained to deal with instruments and choirs, but not to deal with a congregation. They use technical terms that intimidate people who don't have a musical vocabulary. I never say "tenors" or "basses." I say, "all the men here," "all the women here." I try to be as naive as possible. That's hard for musicians.

Most musicians feel that their professional status is undermined if they are not at the organ or working with the choir. These people have to be encouraged to see that musicianship is a matter of finding the appropriate tune, the appropriate way of expressing the tune, the appropriate way of articulating the text but also the appropriate way of working with the congregation.

Any other pointers on selecting music and involving the congregation?

One thing to do is ask whether a song is meant for a congregation to sing or for a choir or for a band. A lot of contemporary music is really meant for a small group to sing.

And then we have to ask how different songs can best be articulated. "Amazing Grace" is a soul song--it's a personal testimony. So why not have one person sing verse one, to take us into this intimate relationship, and then let people join in verse two.

Also, you can ask whether it is a verse-and-chorus song. If it is, don't all sing the verses. Have somebody sing the verses and the congregation sing the chorus. Is it a folk tune? Forget the organ. Is it a syncopated tune? Forget the organ. Just look for the diversity and think about how it is articulated--that allows it to be a good experience for people.

Of course, you have also to keep in mind where the song fits in the flow of the liturgy. Is it a song that helps the community to gather? Does it celebrate or comment on the gospel? In that case, let the preacher be aware that he or she does not have to say what the song has already said.

You can intersperse a reading of a Gospel passage or a psalm with a short song. The songs of Taizé can be used as a response during a prayer. Where does it say that every church service has to have five hymns and they all have to be five stanzas long?

THERE IS A LINE OF WOMEN

(Text. John L. Bell; Sung to the tune of "The seven joys of Mary")

1. There is a line of women,

extending back to Eve,

Whose role in shaping history

God only could conceive.

And though, through endless ages,

their witness was repressed,

God valued and encouraged them

through whom the world was blessed.

So sing a song of Sarah

to laughter she gave birth;

And sing a song of Tamar

who stood for women's worth;

And sing a song of Hannah

who bargained with her Lord;

And sing a song of Mary

who bore and bred God's Word.

2. There is a line of women

who took on powerful men,

Defying laws and scruples

to let life live again.

And though, despite their triumph,

their stories stayed untold

God kept their number growing,

creative, strong and bold.

So sing a song of Shiprah

with Puah at her hand,

Engaged to kill male children

they foiled the king's command.

And sing a song of Rahab

who sheltered spies and lied;

And sing a song of Esther,

preventing genocide.

3. There is a line of women

who stood by Jesus' side,

Who housed him while he ministered

and held him when he died.

And though they claimed he'd risen

their news was deemed suspect

Till Jesus stood among them,

his womanly elect.

So sing a song of Anna

who saw Christ's infant face;

And sing a song of Martha

who gave him food and space;

And sing of all the Marys

who heeded his requests,

And now at heaven's banquet

are Jesus' fondest guests.

Henry Ward Beecher

Book Review:

The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher. By Debby Applegate. Doubleday, 544 pp.

There is something very familiar about The Most Famous Man in America. It is a portrait of a charismatic leader, a brilliant but troubled man who reached the pinnacle of fame only to land in a sexual imbroglio. Its theme could fit any number of contemporary public figures. But this is not the story of a president, televangelist or athlete. It is the story of a minister, the scion of one of the first families of American religion, who became the most prominent preacher of the mid-19th century. Debby Applegate, who holds a Ph.D. in American studies from Yale, is well qualified to tell the story of Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887), having spent nearly two decades researching and writing on her subject. Not only is she intimately acquainted with a wealth of primary sources, she writes in a fluid, captivating style that allows readers to feel that they know Beecher almost as well as she does.

Applegate’s work falls roughly into three sections. The first covers Beecher’s New England upbringing, his struggles with the Calvinism of his ancestors and the beginning of his ministry on the western frontier. The second follows him to Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, where his fame as a preacher and public figure reached its apex and where he made his greatest forays into politics, particularly in the antislavery cause. The third section takes up the event that brought Beecher publicity of a less welcome kind -- his trial for adultery with a parishioner.

This tripartite organization makes the overall narrative disjointed, with Beecher fading to the background as ever more characters crowd onstage and the work becomes a survey of 19th-century history. But this structure also has its merits: Applegate engages the complexity of Beecher’s life and times, situating him in his historical context. She deftly summarizes the emergence of New York as the nation’s economic capital, the history of debates over slavery, the emergence of the women’s suffrage movement, and countless other currents, all of which shaped the 19th-century U.S. and the course of Beecher’s life.

Applegate does not argue that Beecher, in the midst of such tumultuous times, was especially innovative as a preacher, politician or theologian. She notes that as a preacher he borrowed heavily from the camp-meeting style of the frontier Methodists. As a politician he at times infuriated his allies with his caution and moderation. And as a theologian he proclaimed a "Gospel of Love" that would have been anathema to his Calvinist ancestors, with its focus on a personalized experience of God’s unconditional love and on the goodness of human nature -- a theology that drew heavily from transcendentalism and earlier evangelicalism.

All in all, Beecher did not shape public opinion so much as embody it. As Applegate puts it, "Beecher was a bellwether. If he was saying it, plenty of people were thinking it." But by boldly articulating what others were only thinking, Beecher gained numerous enemies as well as fame and adulation. His opposition to slavery brought angry mobs to the doors of his church. Among his supporters, some wondered whether a Christian minister had any business raising money to buy rifles for slavery opponents in Kansas.

Beecher’s emphasis on God’s mercy and human freedom led critics to carp that he was replacing the solid, old-time religion with a vapid, good-time religion. Even admirers like Walt Whitman worried that the force of his personality was creating Beecherites, not Christians. But love him or hate him, no one could ignore him.

When he was a youth, few would have pegged Beecher for such celebrity. He stuttered, seemed awkward around strangers and struggled mightily in school. Yet within a few decades he was one of the most popular lecturers, columnists and preachers in the country. His admirers praised his intellect, but the true secret of his success lay in his charisma. Though many who read his editorials and publications hated him, few who met him in person could resist his charms. Beecher also possessed an attribute common to most celebrities: a sense of timing. Whether through instinct or luck, he invariably found himself in the right place at the right moment.

For all his good qualities and accomplishments, Beecher was no saint. He had extravagant tastes -- he often carried jewels in his pockets -- and used questionable means to finance his lifestyle. He mistreated his family, forgetting his new bride on the journey back from their wedding and neglecting to write his daughter when she gave birth to his first grandchild.

These failings paled in comparison to his sexual indiscretions. In 1874, after years of rumors, a former protégé accused Beecher of adultery. The subsequent trial piqued public interest as no event since Lincoln’s assassination. Suddenly the Gospel of Love took on a new meaning. The sarcastic newspaper headlines practically wrote themselves. The situation seemed bleak, but had Teflon existed in Beecher’s time, his foes might have wondered if he were coated with it: nine of 12 jurors sided with him, his church denounced his accusers and Beecher resumed his work. Of course, no one forgot the trial, but when Beecher died 12 years later, the mourning and the letters of condolence testified that the public loved him as much as ever.

Applegate’s work contains a few failings alongside its virtues -- hardly surprising for a book of such length and scope. For example, she describes the Calvinism against which Beecher rebelled as full of "grim teachings," "morbid theology" and "cruel, convoluted logic." Beecher and his followers might have thought as much, but Applegate’s analysis of the shifting theological landscape would have benefited from a more even-handed attempt to understand the traditional faith on its own terms.

More serious questions emerge regarding Applegate’s discussion of Beecher’s relationship with his famous family. Applegate describes Beecher as a typical middle child who rebelled against his Calvinist father’s values while simultaneously struggling to secure his approval. She suggests that he sought female companionship to compensate for the longing resulting from the death of his mother when he was a child. Applegate thus suggests that both his theological shift and his indiscretions may be attributable to his upbringing. Her speculations rest largely on Beecher’s own writings -- sources often produced years after the fact by a man who, she concedes, tended to remember things in self-serving ways. This intriguing though problematic line of argument largely disappears after the first section.

These reservations aside, Apple-gate offers a perceptive, engaging and beautifully written account of one of the key figures of American religious history. Although Beecher has not been forgotten by historians -- they have produced studies of his preaching and trial, and he appears in most historical surveys -- he has not received the level of attention his importance merits. Anyone interested in 19th-century religion, the roots of the theological views dominant in mainstream Protestantism today, or the thorny question of whether and how religious figures should enter the realm of politics owes Applegate a debt of gratitude.

Dietrick Bonhoeffer

Book Review:

Conspiracy and Imprisoninent, 1940-1945: Dietrich Bonhocifer’s Works, Volume 16. Edited by Mark Brocker. Fortress, 882 pp

This book documents a life interrupted. It might be argued that every life knows interruption, though we rarely look at it that way. For all of us human fallibility, accidents, illness, political events and death overtake what we imagine should be the normal course of our lives. This reality becomes stark in this biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Bonhoeffer’s early and consistent resistance to the intrusion of Nazi ecclesial, political and military machinations is well known: his bold involvement in the Confessing Church, his directorship of the underground seminary community at Finkenwalde (from which time we have his book Life Together), his summons to costly discipleship, the increasing repression of the mid-1930s and his decision to return to Germany in 1939 (although he had the opportunity to become an exile in the United States). We also have become familiar with the contours of his life from the time of his arrest on April 5, 1943, until his execution on April 9, 1945, through both his correspondence from prison with family and friends (especially Eberhard Bethge) and the tantalizing passages describing his theological turn toward a nonreligious interpretation of Christianity, published as Letters and Papers from Prison.

Recently students of Bonhoeffer have begun to incorporate into their portrait of his life his correspondence with Maria von Wedemeyer, his fiancée, published in 1995 as Love Letters from Cell 92. But the story of his life from 1939 to his arrest in 1943, which includes his service with German military intelligence, his participation in a plot to assassinate Hitler and his work on a plan for a new Germany, has been less known. This book, which translates the original German edition and supplements it with additional material, changes that.

After the forced closing of Finkenwalde, Bonhoeffer continued to illegally train students to serve in the Confessing Church through underground pastorates and through the system of supporting ordinands in "collective pastorates" in eastern Pomerania. This work finally led the government to ban Bonhoeffer from public speaking, including teaching and preaching, on September 4, 1940. This edict also imposed residency restrictions and required him to regularly report his whereabouts.

Although this coerced silence gave Bonhoeffer opportunity to intensify the writing of his intended magnum opus, Ethics, it also put him in imminent danger of conscription into the military. After the German victory over France and under "the consistent threat of surveillance and censorship," Bonhoeffer entered a "double life." While remaining committed to the Confessing Church, he became an agent for military intelligence, and there he became involved in the plot to overthrow Hitler’s regime. Here emerges the great moral question raised by Bonhoeffer’s life: Under what conditions, if any, does one choose to become an interruption in order that other interruptions may cease? One can only imagine how this double life appeared to those who saw the decision only from the outside. At one point even his colleague and confidant Karl Barth seemed to question Bonhoeffer’s trustworthiness.

As this volume amply documents through both Bonhoeffer’s own writings and other original source material, he became deeply enmeshed in treasonous activities aimed at overthrowing the government of his beloved Germany. For a Protestant theologian, such engagement was unprecedented. Among these activities was his involvement in Operation 7, which smuggled 14 "non-Aryans" into Switzerland under the guise of an operation of military intelligence. While initially it was the charge of avoiding conscription that led to his arrest, Bonhoeffer’s connection to Operation 7 offered further evidence of sedition, which deepened his legal predicament.

Under the pretext of gathering intelligence, Bonhoeffer also made trips to Switzerland and Sweden, where he used his ecumenical contacts to negotiate on behalf of a post-Hitler German government. Most important in this regard were his relationships with Willem Visser ‘t Hooft, secretary of the World

Student Christian Federation (and later general secretary at the formation of the World Council of Churches) and especially his friend George Bell, Anglican bishop of Chichester. Bell used the information supplied by Bonhoeffer to try to persuade the British government to send signals that it would be ready to negotiate with the German opposition should the Hitler regime fall. The British government deemed this proposal not to be in Allied interest because, in its judgment, the opposition had failed to demonstrate that it was a serious force. Some of the most striking documents in this volume are internal memos between Bell and Anthony Eden, the British secretary of state for foreign affairs.

Bonhoeffer was also involved with those who drafted documents that could serve as the basis for a new order of government after the coup, and he composed a pronouncement pointing toward reorganization of the Protestant church, which could be used in congregations at the conclusion of the war. The editors question whether Bonhoeffer was sufficiently imaginative in conceiving of a new German government and whether he went far enough toward the idea of democracy rather than encouraging a return to a more traditional German state.

All of these plans came to naught with the failure of the July 20, 1944, assassination attempt against Hitler. From this time onward, Bonhoeffer’s fate was sealed, as was that of the other conspirators, including his brothers-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi (his intimate link to the Office of Military Intelligence) and Rüdiger Schleicher.

Bonhoeffer’s execution at the Flossenburg concentration camp shortly before the end of the war is, of course, the ultimate marker of a life interrupted, but the entire book reflects the series of interruptions that invaded both his professional and personal life. Professionally Bonhoeffer was forced by the government ban to sacrifice his public vocation as a preacher and theologian, and he had to become extremely cautious in contacting his former students. Some of the most moving testimony in the volume is found in the circular letters Bonhoeffer composed to maintain contact with the pastors he had trained, almost all of whom were conscripted into military service and many of whom died in the war. In these letters Bonhoeffer names those who had been killed and offers profound pastoral reflections on the significance of their lives. To those who remained, Bonhoeffer gave counsel about living faithfully in circumstances vastly different from their life together at Finkenwalde.

Bonhoeffer’s theological work also bears the marks of interruption. Although the ban on speaking made time available for working on his Ethics, this work consists of fragments. Some of the sections from the first edition of Ethics, which the editors have for reasons of historical accuracy decided to keep separate from the critical edition, are included here. Most provocative is the essay ‘What Does It Mean to Tell the Truth?" Here Bonhoeffer wrestles with a profound existential question that plagued his conscience: "The truthfulness of our words that we owe to God must take on concrete form in the world. Our word should be truthful not in principle, but concretely. A truthfulness that is not concrete is not truthful at all before God." As one reads the documents pertaining to Bonhoeffer’s interrogation, including papers he composed to deceive his interrogators, the subtleties of this essay become all the more vivid. Its completion also interrupted, this essay remains only an enticing fragment.

Signs of interruption are manifest in Bonhoeffer’s personal life as well. Bonhoeffer immersed himself in relationships on many levels. The names of those with whom he corresponded reveal the scope of his influence, not only among theological colleagues but among both prominent and lesser figures in many other arenas. Bonhoeffer corresponded particularly intimately with his closest friend and confidant Eberhard Bethge, who edited his Letters and Papers from Prison. It was the interruption of their friendship that prompted Bethge to devote the rest of his life to the preservation of the Bonhoeffer legacy.

Bonhoeffer was a devoted family member throughout his ordeal. The depth of attachment is revealed in his correspondence with his parents, siblings and other relatives. This volume also includes ten early letters from Dietrich to Maria that chronicle the obstacles they faced in convincing her mother that the relationship should continue. The letters depict the sometimes underestimated maturity that characterized their relationship despite their age difference, and portray the circumstances leading to their engagement. Fuller exploration of the meaning of this tragically interrupted relationship remains on the agenda for future Bonhoeffer scholarship.

When the last chapter is closed, one unanswered question persists: By what calculus does one decide to no longer merely suffer interruption but to become a great interruption in the lives of others, in order that other interruptions might cease? This question applies to both states and individuals. What are the criteria by which a nation may go to war and create interruption on a massive scale? What are the criteria according to which I might justify taking another’s life? Must there not also be such a calculus in the case of suicide bombers? The danger of individual or collective self-deception renders this dilemma especially treacherous, and reference to God or religion makes the problem seem even more unsolvable. Could Bonhoeffer have been wrong about his answer?

The introduction, afterword, translation, appendices and critical apparatus are all stellar work by a dedicated team of scholars whose contribution to future study is enormous. This volume reveals why Bonhoeffer is the most fascinating and arguably the most significant of 20th-century theologians, particularly as we face the interruptions of our own time. Throughout the interruptions of his life, Bonhoeffer placed the living Christ at the center of it all, He knew and witnessed to the truth that only a suffering God can finally help us. We need this word of promise. And as we struggle to be faithful in our own times of patriotic fervor, national idolatries and warmaking, we also need to grapple with Bonhoeffer’s complex relationship to his own country.

It is fitting that the book concludes with Bonhoeffer naming a petition that Jesus taught his disciples, a petition that we should also ardently pray: "May your kingdom come!"