In the same week Focus on the Family’s James Dobson made some pointed comments about Barack Obama’s “confused theology” in his 2006 “Call to Renewal” speech, the senator’s campaign took another step in its deliberate outreach to evangelical voters by hiring Shaun Casey.

An ethics professor at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington D.C., Casey will next month become Obama’s official “senior adviser for religious affairs.” Similar to his informal role in John Kerry’s 2004 campaign, much of Casey’s time will be spent communicating Obama’s personal story and policy positions to leaders of the evangelical world. (Casey was also the lucky one to go to bat for Obama on Good Morning America following Jeremiah Wright’s own pointed comments.)

Casey was one of four figures to speak on religion in public affairs at this weekend’s Christian Scholars Conference, held at Lipscomb University in Nashville, a school affiliated with the Church of Christ denomination (not the UCC) and with the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.

In a one-on-one panel discussion with Stephen Monsma, research fellow at the Paul Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics, Casey expressed his belief that in their tendency to resist “single-issue voting,” younger evangelicals may hold the key to Obama’s victory come November:

The truth about young evangelicals is that they track with their larger age demographic anyway. . . . [It’s] not to say those folks are getting more liberal on abortion or same-sex issues. It just means they’re less inclined to be single-issue voters. The moral basket of issues is larger than just abortion and gay marriage.

According to the Washington Post’s campaign blog, Casey was raised in an evangelical home and attended Abilene Christian University in Texas before going on to Harvard Divinity for three degrees.

For more on Dobson and Obama's theology, see CT editor at large Collin Hansen's "Reading the Bible with Obama."

Posted by Katelyn Beaty at June 30, 2008 3:54PM | Comments (27)

Monday, June 30, 11 a.m.

An brief update on the GAFCON statement and declaration:

Many GAFCON pilgrims are headed home and I met two of them at Ben Gurion airport disappointed that their efforts to include an explicit affirmation of the prolife cause was left off the statement and declaration. In reality, relatively few changes were made to the GAFCON declaration as the rank and file members fed comments to the drafting committee. Efforts to get prolife language were unsuccessful. But Anglican prolife leaders will try again.

Watch for an update on this later today.

Sunday, June 29, 11 a.m

I'm writing as GAFCON pilgrims celebrate their closing Holy Communion. About one hour ago, the GAFCON leader, Archbishop Orombi, read aloud the four page GAFCON statement. The primates who were present publicly signed the document, including: Akinola, Kolini, Nzimbi, Orombi, and Venables. There is space for Primates Akrofi, Mokiwa to sign. They were unable to attend the Sunday signing ceremony.

Go to: www.anglicantv.org later today for video on demand.

After the signing, there was a standing ovation and about 25 minutes of spontaneous singing and African traditional dancing. It was a stunning visual feast. Later, Archbishop Venables will deliver the closing address.

Heads up: Those doubtful that GAFCON is birthing a movement should check out the London event this coming week. On July 1, All Souls Langham Place in London will be hosting a one-day event, reportedly to be attended by 750 Anglican clergy. Archbishops Orombi, Venables, and Jensen are the headliners.

All Souls, where John Stott served as rector for year upon year, is ground zero for evangelical Anglicanism. Since this event in London will occur about two weeks before Lambeth, it means (to me at least) that evangelicals will be game-day ready when the once per decade Lambeth event opens in mid-July on the campus of the University of Kent, in Canterbury. (But ready for what, who knows?)

In the mean time back in the USA, The Episcopal Church has taken another body blow by losing another court round over ownership of church property in Viriginia; and TEC convicted the Episcopal bishop of Penn. for covering up his brother's sexual abuse of a teen-age girl back in the 1970s. Conservatives are happy to see this conviction, but the case has been stalled for years.

Continue reading an earlier dispatch about late night missteps in releasing the GACON statement:

Dispatch: Saturday, July 28

GAFCON Missteps Out of Starting Gate
Embargo breached, GAFCON statement posted hours early on website.

Late Saturday night, near midnight in Jerusalem, the GAFCON press office released a PDF version of the conference statement. It was embargoed until Sunday 8 a.m. in the UK and 10 a.m. in Jeusalem. But within a few minutes, the embargo had been broken, apparently by a so-called "honest mistake."

View the GAFCON Statement here.

Be sure to read the online comments if you are as curious as I was on how this happened.

Well, that was not the only misstep. Less than an hour after the document was released, the leadership team discovered that one final (though small) copy change that a committee of 20 had agreed to had not been included. So GAFCON press officers re-relased it with the corrected language and then they allowed media to question two top (non-Primate) committee members in a background session that lasted until 1 a.m. local time.

Now there's an online fight over cyberspace bragging rights over breaking the embargo! One blog poster says, "Shame on you [embargo breakers] for ruining the final day of the conference."

It's Sunday morning in Jerusalem. Today, there will be a mid-morning worship service, including Holy Communion. Archbishop Venables from Argentina will be preaching. There will be some kind of signing ceremony, followed by lunch and a 2 p.m. local time press conference.

Watch this space for updates later Sunday, June 29.

Posted by Tim Morgan at June 28, 2008 10:55PM | Comments (2)

Reading an economic report at Moody's Economy.com, I was struck by one sentence. It read something like: "If the U.S. falls into recession, it will be because the American family couldn't make good on its debts."

While that oversimplifies all the factors that went into the creating and popping of the housing bubble (including deceptive practices and fraud on the part of lenders and the "irrational exuberance" that accompanies any such asset price inflation), the basic cause of the country's economic problems is the fact that a huge number of borrowers couldn't pay their debts.

As we are seeing, fiscal irresponsibility can be devestating not just to those whose houses are foreclosed upon, but neighbors, lenders, other borrowers, the growing numbers of unemployed, and on and on as the effects ripple through the economy. So, it's about time that some thinkers have begun discussing debt not simply in economic terms, but moral ones.

In a terrific essay, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, lays out how our country instituted a culture of thrift and fiscal responsibility only to give in to hucksters pushing payday loans and the lotto.

Whitehead reports that in 2004--when home prices were escalating and families were easily able to borrow against the inflated value--the typical family spent more than 18 percent of its income on debt payments, 12.2 percent said debt payments exceeded 40% of their income. One in seven families has filed for bancruptcy or sought the help of a credit consolidator. "Few other advanced countries confront a debt debacle comparable to that of the United States."

Financial deregulation, allowing for a massive increase in what lenders could charge borrowers in interest, in the 80s began to unravel the once-wary attitude Americans had toward debt. Lenders began to market their products as bringing the advantages of credit to the masses. No longer did the less than affluent need to save up for the new sofa or pay for a car in cash.

This democratization of credit, however, led to the widespread propagation of debt. Between 1989 and 2001, credit card debt almost tripled, from $238 billion to $692 billion. By fall of 2007, the amount of revolving consumer credit had reached $937.5 billion, a 7 percent increase over the previous year.

In the generally flush 1990s, many families were able to manage higher credit card debt without undue distress, but in today’s more troubled times, families who once kept on top of their credit card balances—even if it meant paying only the minimum on several cards—are now toppling into delinquencies and defaults. Nearly half of all credit card holders have missed payments in the last year.

Creditors today structure loans and repayment terms to keep borrowers borrowing--and creditors flush with fees, interest, and other finance payments. Loans "are structured so that it is hard for the borrower to repay the loan in full. Instead, many consumers end up with little choice but to pay special fees to “roll over” the original loan into the next payday, a practice that can lead to chronic dependency on expensive credit."

Whitehead points out the "loan sharks" are nothing new in American society. As the country industrialized, there were plenty of unscrupulous creditors taking advantage of workers in America's burgeoning cities--workers fresh from the farm who had nothing but their next paycheck to borrow against. "But this was the Progressive Era, and a handful of reformers set out to combat the 'loan sharking evil.' "

Reformers fought to make lending to the poor profitable--allowing banks to charge enough interest to cover the extra risk but not too much to forever impoverish borrowers. Other reformers took on the task of creating "pro-thrift" institutions such as the credit union.

Whitehead's article is based on a report by the Institute for American Values . David Brooks calls the paper, titled “For a New Thrift: Confronting the Debt Culture," "one of the most important think-tank reports you’ll read this year."

Brooks does admit that may not be saying much.

But he agrees that financial decadence is something those concerned about the country's moral shift need to be paying more attention to. There are policy fixes to implement, but, he says, "the most important is to shift values. [Benjamin] Franklin made it prestigious to embrace certain bourgeois virtues. Now it’s socially acceptable to undermine those virtues. It’s considered normal to play the debt game and imagine that decisions made today will have no consequences for the future."

A shift in values is needed in part because those we should be calling upon to bring payday lenders and fast and loose mortgage agents back into line are the politicians. And they're as enslaved to debt as the rest of us. "The debate about our nation's fiscal problems," writes Andrew L. Yarrow in the Balitmore Sun, "is on the wrong track. Debt is a moral issue; by any objective standard, it is wrong to beggar your children."

Our country runs a $9.4 trillion tab and has promised another $50 trillion in outlays (think Social Security and Medicare) that is currently unfunded. What happens to organizations that make huge promises that they can't possibly fulfill? Think the Big Three: Ford, GM, Chrystler. Think Detroit and the Michigan economy.

Yarrow argues that this kind of debt is immoral. "Our culture's Judeo-Christian tradition offers powerful counsel on this subject, words that we should not be afraid to wield. The biblical book of Proverbs, for example, warns that 'the borrower is servant to the lender,' and Psalms 37:21 offers the more pointed injunction that 'the wicked borrow and don't pay back.' "

He offers specific and helpful policy positions and persuasive moral arguments for getting our country's revenues and expenditures back into line: "Increasing the Social Security eligibility age, indexing benefits to price (not wage) inflation and establishing carve-out personal retirement accounts because these are the right things to do for our kids. Speak of sacrifice (whose Latin root means "sacred") for future generations when advocating taxes on those most able to pay." He goes on to address health care, the evironment, and energy.

"As theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said: 'The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world it leaves to its children.' "

Posted by Rob Moll at June 28, 2008 6:52PM | Comments (10)

A Civil War-era law that lets Virginia churches keep their property when leaving a denomination where a "division" has occurred is constitutional, a county judge ruled Friday, June 27, siding with 11 former Episcopal parishes.

Fairfax County Judge Randy I. Bellows' ruling on the 1867 law stops short of awarding the property to the parishes, but it hands them a major legal win.

"It's a resounding victory and very broad," said Steffen Johnson, lead counsel for several of the congregations. "There are just a few loose ends to tie up."

The ruling could encourage the dozens of Episcopal parishes in similar court battles across the U.S., and shake the confidence of mainline Protestant denominations that fear losing churches and people to breakaway groups.

An October trial is scheduled to decide the remaining legal issues, which concern church deeds and property that predate the 1867 law.

The Episcopal Church and the Diocese of Virginia argued that the law infringes on their First Amendment rights to practice religion without government interference.

The diocese signaled that it may appeal the ruling, saying Friday it would "explore fully every option available to restore constitutional and legal protections for all churches in Virginia."

The 1867 law allows churches that are part of a denomination in "division" to keep their property when they decide which side to join.

In a 49-page ruling, Bellows wrote, "While it is true that (the law) requires the court to make factual findings involving religious entities, each of those findings are secular in nature."

Bellows ruled in April that a "division of the first magnitude" has arisen in the worldwide Anglican Communion and its U.S. branch, the Episcopal Church.

Angered over the consecration of an openly gay bishop in New Hampshire, the breakaway churches — including several large, historic parishes — have joined the more conservative Anglican Church of Nigeria.

Episcopal leaders hold that local church property is held in trust for the diocese and the denomination. People may leave, they say, but the steeple stays.

The diocese of Virginia called the ruling "regrettable" and said it "reaches beyond the Episcopal Church to all hierarchical churches in the Commonwealth."

Seven Protestant denominations, some of which are experiencing similar controversies, and several regional church bodies, filed friend-of-the-court briefs supporting the Episcopal Church's interpretation of the law.

Posted by Susan Wunderink at June 27, 2008 8:35PM | Comments (3)

Andrew Sullivan has written an unusually honest and reflective column for The Guardian on the intellectual tradeoffs of living in a one-click-away world.

A veteran of the blogosphere now publishing at a rate of 300 posts per week, Sullivan rhapsodizes over the transformations this has worked on his brain functioning:

I process information far more rapidly and seem able to absorb multiple sources of information simultaneously in ways that would have shocked my teenage self. In researching a topic, or just browsing through the blogosphere, the mind leaps and jumps and vaults from one source to another.

Leaping and vaulting at high speed sounds like the preoccupation of extreme sport adrenaline junkies, which may partially explain Sullivan's quick jump to panicky lament in the next few paragraphs:

When it comes to sitting down and actually reading a multiple-page print-out, or even, God help us, a book, however, my mind seizes for a moment. After a paragraph, I’m ready for a new link. But the prose in front of my nose stretches on.

I get antsy. I skim the footnotes for the quick info high that I’m used to. No good. I scan the acknowledgments, hoping for a name I recognise. I start again.

A few paragraphs later, I reach for the laptop. It’s not that I cannot find the time for real reading, for a leisurely absorption of argument or narrative. It’s more that my mind has been conditioned to resist it.

In trying to name what's at stake here, the 45-year-old journalist and hyper-blogger even displays nostalgia for a computer-less yesteryear:

The experience of reading only one good book for a while, and allowing its themes to resonate in the mind, is what we risk losing. When I was younger I would carry a single book around with me for days, letting its ideas splash around in my head, not forming an instant judgment (for or against) but allowing the book to sit for a while, as the rest of the world had its say – the countryside or pavement, the crowd or train carriage, the armchair or lunch counter. Sometimes, human beings need time to think things through, to allow themselves to entertain a thought before committing to it.

The white noise of the ever-faster information highway may, one fears, be preventing this. The still, small voice of calm that refreshes a civilisation may be in the process of being snuffed out by myriad distractions.

Sullivan is no Luddite, and closes his column with the hopeful assumption that human society will in due time gain mastery of this and every new technology, as it has writing, printing, radio, and television (Sullivan's inclusion of television is an unfortunate choice). He suggests that part of this mastery may involve telling the web where it gets off at regular intervals--i.e. taking a "sabbath" from our many information gadgets, an idea taken up and expanded in Mark Glaser's fine piece at PBS, which you would do well to take up and read...offline.

These pieces raise more questions than a month's worth of Sullivan's posts (1,200+!) could address, but they are particularly refreshing as evidence that there remains among some a sense that humans--amazingly adaptable though we may be--retain a given shape that is not infinitely malleable. We are not information processing units, but people. And whether we willingly acknowledge it, or the universe forces us to bedgrudgingly admit it, we're all sabbath-shaped people.

Posted by Derek Keefe at June 27, 2008 11:23AM | Comments (1)

Some 1100 Anglicans from around the world are meeting this week at the Renaissance hotel in West Jerusalem in hopes of steering the Anglican Communion back to the center of Christian Orthodoxy.

But this conference, now entering its fifth day, is in many respects becoming more difficult to understand and thus easier to misinterpret.

If I were writing purely a critique of the mainstream media coverage, my central criticism would be that US and UK media outlets keep driving the political side of the story (Will there or won't there be a schism?). But they are by and large missing the faith side of the story.

It's easy to do. The folks attending the worship events of GAFCON are telling me that these are high water marks in their own spiritual development. Most worship events are well attended and the plenary sessions are standing room only.

I am told the worship service on Wednesday evening at Ophel Gardens, along the southern steps of the Temple, was a stunning display of contemporary Christian worship in an ancient context. Most media skipped that event (myself included) due to scheduling conflicts.

But the media are not the only ones who are misunderstanding GAFCON. Among conservatives, no surprise, I am coming across three different kinds of Anglicans here who often don't understand each other very well. Let me describe them this way:

* The separationists. These individuals wish to create a new Anglican Communion that is global, not centered in Canterbury.

* The reformers. These folks are not yet ready to give up on the existing Anglican Communion and have a movement strategy for redeeming and restoring the Communion.

* The new paradigm. This is the trickiest one to understand. Under a new paradigm, Anglicanism becomes a global network, locally distinctive, church or community-based, and centered on the biblical mission of evangelism and discipleship.

One new reality of GAFCON is that the discussions here across the Anglican food chain from the Primates to the small groups of lay and parish clergy have moved beyond "The American Problem," which is The Episcopal Church, its bitterly hostile actions against conservatives, and the advent of homosexual clergy and same-sex unions. Bishop Bob Duncan, the American conservative leader from Pittsburgh, isn't even here.

Last night, scholar Lamin Sanneh, Palestinian Christian Salim Munayer, and Messianic pastor Evan Thomas pointed GAFCON Anglicans toward a future that was global, reconciling, and biblical. Years from now, we might find that the only English element left in 21st century Anglicanism is the English language itself.

In my mind, the questions of the hour before the committee drafting a GAFCON statement are these:

What will the drafting committee emphasize? Will they lay the groundwork for a new communion? Will they map out a process of Anglican Communion reform? Or, will they envision a new kind of Anglicanism that is post-colonial, not nationalistic, but conciliar, global, and networked?

Tomorrow, GAFCON small groups are due to evaluate the statement in draft form.

Posted by Tim Morgan at June 26, 2008 4:57AM | Comments (9)

For decades Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country, has been looked to as a beacon of relative tolerance among Muslim majority states. (Indonesia's population of 237.5 million people is 80 percent Muslim.) Consider the following from the 2000 edition of the Operation World prayer guide:

Monotheism and communal peace are the basis for the stated government ideology of Pancasila. All citizens must choose one of five religions: Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, or Christianity (Protestant or Catholic).

But in recent years, radical Islamists have been attempting to impose a stricter version of the religion of Muhammad on their fellow Muslims--and on the rest of the nation. On June 9 the government ruled that the minority Ahmadiyah sect, a more liberal branch of Islam, may not spread its beliefs. As a result, Islamists last week sealed off more than 10 Ahmadiyah mosques. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal Asia says the government-sanctioned discrimination is unlikely to end there:

If radical thugs are allowed to target Ahmadiyah houses of worship today with impunity, what prevents them from targeting other kinds of Muslims tomorrow? Or Christians? Or Sikhs? The government's refusal to protect the Ahmadiyah threatens the underpinnings of Indonesia's tolerant society. It's a familiar theme in history, and one that has not boded well for liberal democracies.

And indeed there are numerous signs of strain on the country's communal harmony. According to a recent report by Reuters:

There is a growing risk of conflict between Muslims and Christians in Indonesia's Papua, partly fuelled by migration and a growth in fundamentalism, International Crisis Group said in a report on [June 16].

Twice last year in Papua, two provinces on the western half of New Guinea island, communal tensions almost erupted into violence linked to tensions over the building of a new mosque and an iron tower in the form of a Christmas tree, it said.

"The potential for communal conflict is high in Papua because both sides consider themselves aggrieved," said Sidney Jones, a senior adviser for the International Crisis Group.

Indigenous Christians feel threatened by ongoing Muslim migration from other parts of Indonesia, while Muslims are concerned about facing discrimination or even expulsion, it said.

The prospect of conflict has also been fanned by religious tensions in other parts of Indonesia such as the Maluku islands, which have suffered from fighting between Christians and Muslims.

Posted by Stan Guthrie at June 25, 2008 12:07PM | Comments (4)

Tonight at 9pm Eastern, PBS’s Frontline/World will air a documentary (a joint project with the Tribune) on Christianity in China.

The Chicago Tribune today published its second cover story in a row on “Jesus in China.” Their articles this week hit on many of the recent issues in Chinese Christianity, including the rapid rise in attendance, the compromises of membership in the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (the state church), and the fact that this wave of Christianity is not led by foreign missionaries.

Evan Osnos, the Tribune's Beijing bureau chief, draws a lot of material from Zion church in the first installation, “Jesus in China: Christianity’s rapid rise”:

Rev. Jin Mingri peered out from the pulpit and delivered an unusual appeal: "Please leave," the 39-year-old pastor commanded his followers, who were packed, standing-room-only on a Sunday afternoon, into a converted office space in China's capital. "We don't have enough seats for the others who want to come, so, please, only stay for one service a day."

A choir in hot-pink robes stood to his left, beside a guitarist and a drum set bristling with cymbals. Children in a playroom beside the sanctuary punctuated the service with squeals and tantrums. It was a busy day at a church that, on paper, does not exist.

The piece also gets into some of the Chinese church’s cultural aspirations, such as encouraging basically ethical behavior.

“Jesus in China: Life on the edge” began by showing Christians taking the offensive in claiming religious rights in China. “Christians form a diverse lobby that is rare in a nation split by class, opportunity and geography” and are often inspired by the American Civil Rights movement, Osnos reports. (CT covered this movement—and its admiration for Martin Luther King Jr.—in 2006) One non-Christian rights advocate even called Christianity “China’s largest non-governmental organization.”

The Tribune also posted videos on church life and China’s “Bible Empire.”

Our recent coverage of China includes a May cover story on urban Christianity.

Posted by Susan Wunderink at June 24, 2008 2:40PM | Comments (8)

Ship of Fools
This U.K.-based “magazine of Christian unrest” eschews cynicism in favor of gentler prodding from an orthodox vantage. Popular features include Signs and Blunders, Fruitcake Zone, and Mystery Worshipper, in which anonymous reviewers attend services around the world, reporting on sermon length, pew comfort, and coffee temperature.

Geez
Lives up to its billing as “holy mischief in an age of fast faith.” Both subversive and edifying, this Canada-based site offers voices from opposing beliefs to keep it fresh and unpredictable. They recently held a sermons-you’ll-never-hear-in-church contest, calling for “words that are too hot, too happy, too whatever for the church to handle—yet still need to be said.”

The Revealer
A smart review of religion in the news that winks as it scolds the press for getting religion wrong. Demands better coverage of faith — sharper thinking, thicker description. Mantra: “Belief matters, whether or not you believe.” Editor Jeff Sharlet writes that he was “raised in as many churches, synagogues, and ashrams as his Christian/Jewish parents had friends.”

Busted Halo
Paulist Young Adult Ministries — a Catholic organization — sponsors this hip online mag for 20- and 30-something seekers. Features balanced and though-provoking articles (with titles like “Oxymoron No Longer: On Being Black and Catholic in America”), reviews, and interviews. Cool video and audio clips, too.

Heeb
This satirical Jewish “zine for the plugged-in and preached-out” is so funny and topical that only the most dour of goys could visit it without breaking a smile. Its mission encompasses the prophetic (“a plague on modern-day pharaohs”) and the fun (“a Carnival cruise to the Garden of Eden”). Covers arts, culture, and politics.

Posted by Susan Wunderink at June 23, 2008 2:11PM | Comments (1)

I'm in transit to Israel to cover the Global Anglican Futures event in Jerusalem this week. But there has been great anticipation of Sunday's opening address of Primate Archbishop of All Nigeria Peter Akinola. Akinola is, according to imprecise media reports, the force behind talk of schism in the global Anglican Communion.

But any plain reading of his remarks, which the GAFCON press office released today, indicate that he and other consevatives have a reformist, not a separatist, agenda.

Here are some highlights from Archbishop Akinola's remarks:

People of the living God, welcome to Jerusalem. Welcome to GAFCON. One of the marks of apostolic ministry is signs, wonders and miracles. There are many in today’s Church, who would lay claim to apostolic authority without holding on to apostolic faith nor do they manifest any of the marks of the apostles. In GAFCON, I have seen signs and wonders. That we are able to gather here this week is a miracle for which we must give thanks to God.

Why are we here? What have we come to do?

The Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) holding here in the holy land this week has understandably elicited both commendation and contempt in varying measures from all who claim a stake in shaping the future identity or in destroying the traditional identity of the global Anglican Communion.

Those who failed to admit that by the unilateral actions they took in defiance of the Communion have literally torn the very fabric of our common life at it deepest level since 2003, are grumbling that we are here to break the Communion.

Similarly, those who fail, for whatever reason to come to terms with the painful reality that the Communion is in a state of brokenness and lacked the ability to secure a genuine reconciliation, but simply carried on the work of the Communion in a manner that is business as usual are not happy with us.

And of course there are those who argue that while there may be some justification for GAFCON; why not call it after Lambeth 2008.

But thanks be to God that there are millions of people around the world including members of other denominations and those of other faiths who not only share our concerns but have chosen to partner with us and are praying for us.

For those of us gathered here in the Name of the Lord, and on behalf of the over 35 million faithful Anglicans we represent GAFCON is a continuation of that quiet but consistent initiative, a godly instrument appointed to reshape, reform, renew and reclaim a true Anglican Biblical orthodox Christianity that is firmly anchored in historic faith and ancient formularies.

Be that as it may, we must note that we cannot understand our present circumstance without locating it within the context of the controversies of the past decade. Every responsible historian knows that his task is predicated on the treasury of past events – rightly interpreted, as the compass for the present and guide for the future. For this reason, GAFCON takes its bearings from the tides of varied opinions and equivocations that have characterised our Communion in the last few years and exposed our once robust reputation as children of the Reformation to scorn. We were well-known for our stand on Scripture as the foundation stone of our tradition and reason.

The underlying objective of GAFCON necessarily compels a deep and honest reflection on the theological and ecclesiological inconsistencies of the past decade at the highest and most sacred levels of our Communion. While not contesting the right to personal opinions and attitudes to this new situation, we must disabuse our minds of the unworthy views about GAFCON being a monster on the horizon, or even a strange breed of Anglicanism devoid of antecedent factors.

Whichever way you look at it, the Communion is deeply in trouble. This is not only because of the actions of TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada but also because the hitherto honoured Instruments of Communion, in recent years have, by design become instruments of disunity, putting the Communion in an unprecedented brokenness and turmoil.

My back of the envelope analysis is that both the conservatives and the revisionists are placing the blame on each other for the sorry state of the Anglican Communion. At the moment, the bottom line is the schism just isn't on the agenda for the left or right. There is, however, a struggle for the soul of Anglicanism in this post-colonial, pro-nationalist era.

Posted by Tim Morgan at June 22, 2008 1:30PM | Comments (19)

I never imagined Irv Rubin and I would agree on anything. He was the leader of the Jewish Defense League, an organization, founded by Meir Kahane, that took the ADL's efforts to terrorist extremes and could make an anti-Semite out of Tevye the milkman. I was the archetypal product of assimilation, a liberal evangelical with a Jewish last name and an affinity for understanding all religions.

But a few years back, which coincidentally was a few years after Rubin died in prison, I found myself in his camp. I had set out to write about the propensity for city officials and invited ministers to invoke Jesus' name in the prayers preceding municipal meetings. Thanks to Irv Rubin, who sued the city of Burbank in 1999 to prohibit sectarian prayers, referring by name to any deity -- Allah, YHWH, Jesus, Buddha, the Flying Spaghetti Monster -- had been ruled unconstitutional; the state and U.S. supreme courts let the ruling stand.

As a proponent of the separation of church and state, I couldn't have agreed more. But what I found was that few cities, at least in my community of San Bernardino and eastern Los Angeles counties, paid any mind.

"Lord Jesus, we'd like to give you thanks and praise," Rialto Councilman Joe Sampson began a meeting, which he later defended because the United States is a "Christian country."

I assumed that with time this would change. But that has not been the case. In Ontario, Calif., Tuesday, a day after the mayor apologized for "errors in his private life" that vaguely referred to allegations he had an affair with a city employee, Pastor Larry Enriguez invoked Jesus' words to a mob ready to lynch an adulteress in the eighth chapter of John: "He who is without sin, cast the first stone."

True words. Very true words when talking about, say, your covetous neighbor. But not when dealing with an elected official who may or may not have been diddling a taxpayer-supported subordinate.

More important, though, is the fact that these words are not appropriate for government meetings. I say this as a Christian who believes Jesus' message contains incredible power. But I also say this as someone who believes religion should not be forced into the public square. We all know how this ends up for those not in power. And what if the tables are turned? Judge not lest ye be judged.

Posted by Brad Greenberg at June 20, 2008 10:07AM | Comments (32)

N.T. Wright will be on The Colbert Report tonight (11:30 p.m. eastern, 10:30 central). To whet your appetite, head over to CatholicColbert.com for some of the show’s best clips on religion (well, on Catholicism, anyway).

Unfortunately, CatholicColbert.com has slowed down lately — the last post was April 22, and there’s no mention, for example, of the following week’s religion-heavy episode with Anne Lamott, the religion-filled May 27 episode with bits on John Hagee and a brutal interview with guest Tony Perkins, or Rick Warren’s visit earlier this year.

Last night, Colbert continued his commentary on Obama’s church resignation by launching “Barack Obama's Church Search.” The first installment had Hindu Temple Society of North America President Uma Mysorekar on whether Obama should convert to Hinduism.

If Colbert’s so-many-layers-of-irony-he-might-be-sincere shtick doesn’t appeal to you, set your TiVo to record PBS’s “Jesus in China,” a Frontline/World documentary with Chicago Tribune China correspondent Evan Osnos. It airs on PBS stations Tuesday night.

If both shows appeal, you can watch Osnos on Colbert. PBS and Comedy Central will have their respective programs available online after they air.

Update: The Wright video is below. But it turns out that Colbert's other guest beat the bishop to the punch in quoting Scripture. Cookie Monster paraphrased Deuteronomy 8:3: "One cannot live on cookies alone.”

Posted by Ted Olsen at June 19, 2008 10:33AM | Comments (1)

Here's a sad story from The Christian Century about how Christians don't understand their own tradition, written by a woman who teaches "Intro to World Religions" at Piedmont College:

Students who complete the class say they feel more at home in the world. They are less easily frightened by religious difference. They are more informed neighbors, better equipped to wage peace instead of war.

The only place the course backfires is in the unit on Christianity. Students who have spent every Sunday of their lives in church may be able to name the books of the Bible in order, but they rarely have any idea how those books were assembled. They know they belong to Victory Baptist Church, but they do not know that this makes them Protestants, or that the Christian tree has two other major branches more ancient than their own. Very few have heard of the Nicene Creed. Most are surprised to learn that baptism is supposed to be a one-time thing.

With only five class sessions for each religion, I cover the basics quickly: early Christian history, composition and content of the New Testament, the Great Schism, the Protestant Reformation, central Christian doctrines and common religious practices. Faced with so much new information, students often have a hard time formulating their questions.

"If Paul wasn't one of the 12 disciples, where did he get his stuff?"

"Do Catholics really think saints answer their prayers?"

As often as I have answered such questions, my sinking feeling never goes away. The things I tell students are so different from the things they have heard in church that I can hear their brains straining against the waves. They never noticed that Matthew and Luke tell different stories of Jesus' birth, or that Mark and John tell no such stories at all. They never imagined that the first Christians did not walk around with New Testaments in their pockets. No one ever told them about Constantine, Augustine, Benedict or Martin Luther. They never thought about what happened during the centuries between Jesus' resurrection and their own professions of faith. In their minds, they fell in line behind the disciples, picking up the proclamation of the gospel where those simple fishermen left off.

Even as they are turning in their quizzes, the students know that something has just gone badly wrong. "I think I just did the worst on my own religion," one says.

The rest of the article can be read here. I find this tragic but not surprising. We're not even talking about a major university here that might offer in-depth explorations into a Christian theology foreign to Sunday School graduates. This is basic intro-to-Christianity, Huston-Smith stuff.

This reminds me of Os Guinness' book "Fit Bodies, Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals Don't Think and What to Do About It." I also think it has a lot to do with the unbiblical teachings that can be heard in many churches.

Any thoughts?

This article was cross-posted at The God Blog.

Posted by Brad Greenberg at June 17, 2008 12:54PM | Comments (15)

While not unheard of, it's not typical for a CT writer to applaud the United Church of Christ for its theological stances. However, let's give credit to whom it is due.

Last month the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in a lawsuit filed by St. John's UCC in Bensenville, Illinois. The church is trying to prevent the city of Chicago from digging up the 1,400-grave cemetery in a plot right next to O'Hare International Airport. Since the summer of 2001, the city has been working to expand the overcrowded airport -- one of the busiest in the world and one to avoid at all costs during the summer and winter and any other time that weather tends to be inclement. (On top of that, it is the headquarters of the "Worst. Airline. Ever.")

Last month the Supreme Court let stand a lower court ruling, which found the city's attempt to relocate the graves did not violate the church's First Amendment rights, "because Chicago's motive for relocating nearly 1,300 graves is strictly secular," reported the Chicago Tribune. Other cases are working their way through the courts, and they claim that moving the graves would interfere with worshipers' and family members' religious freedom.

One might dismiss the religious freedom argument. After all, plenty of people are opposed to expanding the massive airport. Bensenville Village President John C. Geils told the Chicago suburban Daily Herald "This is a clear case of discrimination and a denial of the deeply held religious beliefs of the church and the affected families." The village, and several others, is also fighting the expansion. So, cynics might argue the church is being used by local governments, or perhaps St. John's agrees with those parties that a bigger O'Hare means a bigger headache for local residents.

However, take a look at the lawsuit. Why are they suing? The lawsuit states:

Destroying the cemeteries not only “inhibits,” but completely precludes Plaintiffs from fulfilling their religious obligation to care for their fellow Christians, and to ensure that their full participation in the Resurrection is not jeopardized by disturbance of the sacred ground where they were laid to rest until Resurrection Day.

Amen!

While physically disturbing a grave does not jeopardize the corpse's salvation, the violation of a "sleeping" Christian has for centuries been a serious matter. Until the widespread use of embalming following the Civil War, in fact, disturbing the dead was a grave deed. Dead Christians were merely asleep as they awaited the resurrection, at which time, because God would return them to life just as he did Jesus, it would make sense to have all the bodily pieces nearby. Visit any old graveyard on the East coast (dating from the 1600s and early 1700s), and nearly every tombstone will say something about the body of the Christian beneath the ground awaiting its quickening on the last day. (See N.T. Wright for more on the theology of the resurrection.)

Perhaps St. John's UCC is using traditional Christian theology in order to keep its church and cemetery, but they've recalled a central belief that many evangelicals who claim the label of orthodoxy have forgotten, at least in practice. This UCC church is keeping "the sacred ground where [their brothers and sisters] were laid to rest until Resurrection Day."

Thanks be to God.

Posted by Rob Moll at June 15, 2008 8:38PM | Comments (10)

An overnight e-mail from a friend in Wales informed us that Ghanian theologian Kwame Bediako passed away this week. Bediako was a brilliant scholar with doctorates in French literature and in theology. He fostered the development of a genuinely African theology (distinct from the Black liberation theology that developed in South Africa). Bediako used the models of Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria to argue that just as they used the Greco-Roman cultural categories of their time to contextualize the Gospel and create a Christian identity, so should African Christians use their own cultural heritage in forming their Christian identity.

Chris Wright, International Director of the Langham Partnership International (John Stott Ministries in the US), has written a brief tribute to Bediako that is posted on the Zondervan blog. The blog features a video clip of Bediako preaching at Zondervan's chapel just last month, and a link to the Africa Bible Commentary, for which Bediako was one of the three theological advisers.

Posted by David Neff at June 13, 2008 8:40AM | Comments (10)

I was wrong. The election of Johnny Hunt as president of the Southern Baptist Convention did not actually generate much analysis in the Baptist blogosphere. Instead, almost all the discussion is about a resolution on church membership numbers.

Numbers were a key theme of the meeting this year, and none were good news:

• 9,500: Expected number of “messengers” (delegates) at the convention.
• 7,200: Actual number of messengers.
• 419,342: Baptisms in Southern Baptist churches in 1999.
• 345,941: Baptisms in 2007.
• 5.5%: Drop in baptisms between 2007 and 2006.
• 3: The number of consecutive years in which baptism numbers have dropped in the SBC.
• 22: Number of years that outgoing president Frank Page says it will take, given current trends, for the SBC to lose half its churches (from about 44,000 to 20,000).
• 39,326: Drop in membership Southern Baptist Convention between 2006 and 2007.
• 10: Years since the last drop in membership.
• 2: Number of years SBC membership has declined since 1926.
• 16,266,920: Members in 2007.
• 6,148,868: Southern Baptist members who in 2007 attended a primary worship service of their church in a typical week.

Those final two statistics really drove the resolution “On Regenerate Church Membership and Church Member Restoration.”

The resolution, which calls for churches to “maintain accurate membership rolls” and exercise church discipline “even if such efforts result in the reduction in the number of members that are reported,” was submitted in two previous years but failed in both cases.

Critics had earlier argued that purging the membership rolls could hurt evangelism — after all, if there are “unregenerate” people in the pews, they’re the ones who most need to hear the gospel. Other critics complained that such a resolution would violate the fundamental Baptist value of the autonomy of local churches.

But this year the convention passed the resolution by an overwhelming margin.

There was some debate over an amendment to the resolution calling for churches “to repent of the failure among us to live up to our professed commitment to regenerate church membership.” The resolutions committee had opposed such wording.

"We felt it was not proper to ask our entire convention to repent when there are many godly, conscientious pastors … that are actually exercising this stewardship from the Lord of their flocks and of their fellowships,” committee chairman Darrell Orman explained.

But Tom Ascol, the main force behind the resolution, said every one needed to repent.

"If we need to repent over anything in the Southern Baptist Convention, it is true that we need to repent over how we have failed in maintaining biblical standards in the membership of our churches,” he said.

After all, pastors reporting only “regenerate” membership probably still refer to the Southern Baptist Convention as having 16.2 million members, even though those pastors probably know that number is inflated.

Union University president of David Dockery, whose speech at the convention is largely credited with giving the resolution a boost, told The Tennessean that the SBC would likely lose a million members once the membership rolls were cleaned up.

But the number may be much higher than that. Millions of members (about 7 million, according to one site) are “non-resident,” meaning they do not live near the church that calls them a member. Millions more are completely inactive, and still more attend only occasionally.

Convention speakers repeatedly spoke of that phenomenon as a scandal. "We are not even winning our own sons and daughters like we should," North Carolina’s Al Gilbert said in his Wednesday sermon. “We have incredible numbers of people on our rolls that are inactive and probably lost.”

To see the looming battle in SBC churches, put those two sentences together. Saying its time to purge the rolls of inactive members or of those who have moved away is one thing. But actually taking Bobby Smith’s name off after he moves away for college and stops attending church might not be welcome news to Bobby’s parents.

(Another potential battle is financial: Distribution of Cooperative Program funds are partly based on churches’ membership numbers. Rigorous accuracy may be costly.)

Johnny Hunt, the new president of the Southern Baptist Convention, supported the resolution but said he was wary of its implementation. “There are two ways to deal with it,” he told The Tennessean:

Some would say, “Clean up the rolls. If they're not going to come, take them off.” And then what you have to deal with is we are living in a generation [with different views on commitments]. I probably minister to 10,000 people every 30 days; they're just not there every week. USA Today did a story not long ago and a person said if they go once a month, they feel they're active. I would not say they are, but I have to give them credit that in their heart, that's where they feel they are. I would like to see them more committed, but we work on that. We try to call them; we try to write those who are not coming. But I think what we are saying with regenerate church membership is we need to do a better job, and who would not agree? …

We have to be very careful. If you try to take this to the lowest common denominator, before too long, you'll find the pastors and the church leadership to try to separate the sheep from the goats, and only Jesus and the angels he assigned can do that.

The problem, says Dockery, is that churches are letting many goats think they’re sheep: “One thing worse than people being lost in their sins is lost people who think they are saved because their names are on a church roll.”

The resolution is nonbinding. Churches can keep reporting their membership numbers as they always have. But the gauntlet has been thrown. Answering the challenge won’t be easy. A commenter on Ascol’s blog notes the problem at one church: “[T]he constitution requires a 75 percent vote to remove someone from the roll (outside of death or transfer to another church) and only 50 percent-plus-one to remove a pastor."

(Note: An earlier version of this blog post indicated that the resolution passed "nearly unanimously." Several observers have since said it passed overwhelmingly, but that there were many votes against it.)

Posted by Ted Olsen at June 12, 2008 11:30AM | Comments (24)

Time for an update on the $50 billion bill before Congress to re-authorize the PEPFAR legislation.

There is a group of conservative US Senators holding up a vote in the Senate on the reauthorization of the bill for PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Action Plan for AIDS Relief.

A June 11 piece on Politico spells out the problem for the everyday reader:

President Bush’s program to fight HIV/AIDS is considered by Republicans and Democrats alike to be one of the unvarnished foreign policy successes of his presidency. So why has broad bipartisan legislation seeking to more than triple the program’s funding to $50 billion caused such a rancorous fight? Ask Sen. Tom Coburn, M.D. The Oklahoma Republican, along with six other social conservatives, has put a hold on the bill in the Senate, unless a provision is added to direct most of the spending toward treatment for HIV/AIDS rather than toward prevention and other priorities. Otherwise, Coburn said, “the vast majority of the money is going to get consumed by those wanting to help people with HIV, rather than [by] people with HIV.” Coburn argues that treatment of HIV/AIDS-affected individuals usually drops their viral load to the point where they will not infect other people, and thus, it’s “the No. 1 prevention protocol we have.”

Coburn is the junior senator from Oklahoma and one of the few MDs currently serving in Congress. As a conservative, a Southern Baptist, and a Republican, he otherwise gets good marks. For example, Family Research Council granted a 100 rating to Coburn for his 2006 vote record.

But, Coburn and others are taking lots of heat from the faith community that supports the current legislation. Some 36 organizations have signed on to a declaration to ask Senators to vote on PEPFAR and another measure to extend debt relief to the poorest nations.

One of the big reasons the political pressure is on now is that President Bush will be going to the G 8 Summit, which this summer will be in Japan. The Washington Post reported in early June that Bush hopes to pressure G 8 nations for follow through on allocating more money to fight the spread of HIV. If Congress has approved $50 billion in more spending, that might persuade other leaders that the US is in this fight for the long haul.

Actually, a growing concern is overheated, over-moralizing rhetoric. There's a new term on the net for this kind of approach. It is being called: Gersonism, after Mike Gerson, former Bush speechwriter. Read about that here.

Who's got the greater truth here, Gerson or Coburn?

Posted by Tim Morgan at June 12, 2008 10:30AM | Comments (1)

Johnny Hunt, senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Woodstock, Ga., has been elected the new president of the Southern Baptist Convention.

It's not a huge surprise: he's a megachurch pastor with a lot of support among the SBC leadership. It is a bit of a surprise that he won by so much. With 3,100 votes, he had more than twice as many as the next candidate, fellow Atlanta-area megachurch pastor Frank Cox of North Metro Baptist Church in Lawrenceville, Ga. With six candidates for the position -- the most since 1979, when the conservative resurgence in the denomination began -- many expected the vote to go to a runoff .

What does Hunt's presidency mean for the SBC? So far, it's hard to tell, though I'm sure the Baptist bloggers will be full of analysis tonight. Hunt's main emphases were preaching and missions (he was particularly vocal about finding new ways of funding missions). But his stances on controversies within the denominations may have had an effect as well.

It's clear that Hunt is no fan of the growing Calvinist movement within the Southern Baptist Convention. He's hosting a major conference to refute Calvinism at his church in November. But most of the candidates were not friendly to Calvinism, and Hunt has given indications that he's not out to purge the denomination of Reformed influences.

"I am not overwhelmingly concerned about Calvinism," Hunt told Baptist Press two weeks ago. "I am concerned about hyper-Calvinism, simply being defined as those that take election to the point that they feel that the Gospel should not even be shared with the whole world. ... I trust that Calvinists, and those who love Jesus of other persuasions, would come together for the common cause of making Jesus Christ known to the nations. There is plenty of room for all of us in this Baptist family."

It's worth noting that Frank Page, the current SBC president was also highly critical of Calvinism (even writing a book titled Trouble with the Tulip) but had an irenic spirit that won him support among Calvinists and Arminians alike.

Things may have gone quite differently had Al Mohler, the Calvinist president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, stayed in the race (he suffered health complications).

Hunt was actually a leading candidate during the last SBC presidential election, but dropped out a month before the vote.

Hunt might be considered a moderate (though that word is awfully complicated in the SBC context) on one of the denomination's biggest controversies: the International Missions Board's guidelines forbidding missionaries from using private prayer languages, and requiring them to have been baptized in a specific way. Hunt told Baptist Press:

I am not sure that I fully understand all that the IMB trustee guidelines have said, however, if a person has received Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior, and has been baptized by a minister who embraces the Gospel and the Scriptures as we do, their baptism should count in our churches. If James Dobson desired to become part of First Baptist Church Woodstock, I would not require him to be re-baptized.

Concerning the private prayer language: If, indeed, it is private, it seems as though we really don't have an issue to deal with. When a person chooses to become more Pentecostal in their convictions and beliefs, our concern then becomes that of what they are relating to the people on the field. That should call for proper action.

That's an answer that's unlikely to please either of the two major sides in the debate, but it's an answer that's also unlikely to make either to see him as a crusader for the opposition.

Baptist blogger Nathan Finn publicly supported Hunt before the election, and his lengthy blog post last month serves nicely to summarize the main concerns people had about a Hunt presidency, and how Hunt supporters answered.

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Posted by Ted Olsen at June 10, 2008 2:59PM | Comments (20)

In a piece subtitled, “Fired and brimstone,” The Examiner relays that George Bush canned Karl Rove in church.

The information comes from yet another pre-postmortem book on the Bush administration, Machiavelli’s Shadow: The Rise and Fall of Karl Rove, by former Time reporter Paul Alexander. The Examiner summarizes:

“On a Sunday in midsummer, George W. Bush accompanied Karl Rove to the Episcopalian Church Rove sometimes attended,” writes Alexander. “They made their way to the front of the congregation. Then, during their time in the church, Bush gave Rove some stunning news. ‘Karl,’ Bush said, ‘there’s too much heat on you. It’s time for you to go.’”

Maybe Bush knew what he was doing in breaking such bad news in such serene atmosphere: As Alexander documents, Rove has quite the temper.

Posted by Susan Wunderink at June 10, 2008 2:09PM | Comments (1)

Less than a month after being placed on paid leave, American Bible Society (ABS) president Paul G. Irwin failed to have his annual contract renewed by the organization’s trustees. Irwin had served as president of the Bible society since 2005.

The trouble for Irwin started with a May 18 New York Times story about Richard J. Gordon, an expensive Web consultant whom Irwin had hired. Gordon, the story revealed, had a criminal record and longstanding business ties to pornographers. Gordon had also done credit card processing work for an online gambling enterprise.

Tax records from 2005 to 2007 reveal that the Bible society paid more than $5 million to Gordon’s companies. Several employees have questioned Irwin’s expenditures and decision-making during his tenure at ABS, and the organization’s trustees launched an independent financial investigation in wake of the New York Times report.

Posted by Madison Trammel at June 9, 2008 3:57PM | Comments (8)

I mentioned last month that John McCain's trump card for socially conservative Christians would be his well-established opposition to abortion. But that just doesn't rally the troops like it used to.

In 2004, to stoke turnout among conservatives, Karl Rove engineered the addition of anti-gay-marriage voter initiatives to the ballots in Ohio and other states; last week, though, when the California Supreme Court voted to allow gay marriage in that state, only hard-core activists were able to muster much outrage. When it comes to the Constitution, McCain is on the wrong side of the voters, and of history

Save for California, I don't know any states that will be voting on gay marriage in November. That could make it even harder for McCain to win over those evangelical Christians the NYT reports remain wary of the presumptive Republican nominee:

Lori Viars, an evangelical activist in Warren County, Ohio, essentially put her life on hold in the fall of 2004 to run a phone bank for President Bush. Her efforts helped the president’s ambitious push to turn out evangelicals and win that critical swing state in a close election.

But Ms. Viars, who is among a cluster of socially conservative activists in Ohio being courted by Senator John McCain’s campaign through regular e-mail messages, is taking a wait-and-see attitude for now toward Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee.

“I think a lot of us are in a holding pattern,” said Ms. Viars, who added that she wanted to see whom Mr. McCain picked for his running mate.

(skip)

The campaign has been peppering over 600 socially conservative grass-roots and national leaders with regular e-mail messages — highlighting, for example, Mr. McCain’s statement criticizing a May 15 decision by the California Supreme Court overturning the state’s ban on same-sex marriage, or his recent speech on his judicial philosophy. It has also held briefings for small groups of conservative leaders before key speeches. Charlie Black, one of Mr. McCain’s senior advisers, recently sat down with a dozen prominent evangelical leaders in Washington, where he emphasized, among other things, Mr. McCain’s consistent anti-abortion voting record.

Mr. McCain’s outreach to Christian conservatives has been a quiet courting, reflecting a balancing act: his election hopes rely on drawing in the political middle and Democrats who might be turned off should he woo the religious right too heavily by, for instance, highlighting his anti-abortion position more on the campaign trail.

“If McCain tried Bush’s strategy of just mobilizing the base, he would almost certainly fall short,” said John C. Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. “Because the Republican brand name is less popular and the conservative base is restive, McCain has special needs to reach out to independent and moderate voters, but, of course, he can’t completely neglect the evangelical and conservative base.”

The instrumental role of evangelicals in Mr. Bush’s victory in 2004 over Senator John Kerry is an oft-repeated tale at this point. Mr. Bush’s openness about his personal faith and stances on social issues earned him a following among evangelicals, who represented about a quarter of the electorate in 2004. Exit polls in the 2004 election found that 78 percent of white “born again” or evangelical Protestants had voted for Mr. Bush.

In contrast, Mr. McCain’s relationship with evangelicals has long been troubled. In 2000, when he was running against Mr. Bush for the Republican nomination, Mr. McCain castigated Pat Robertson and the Rev. Jerry Falwell as “agents of intolerance.”

In a sign of the lingering distrust, Mr. McCain finished last out of nine Republican candidates in a straw poll last year at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, a gathering for socially conservative activists.

James C. Dobson, the influential founder of the evangelical group Focus on the Family, released a statement in February, when Mr. McCain was on the verge of securing the Republican nomination, affirming that he would not vote for Mr. McCain and would instead stay home if he became the nominee. Dr. Dobson later softened his stance and said he would vote but has remained critical of Mr. McCain.

“For John McCain to be competitive, he has to connect with the base to the point that they’re intense enough that they’re contagious,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. “Right now they’re not even coughing.”

We've heard about a million times how important socially conservative Christians -- often overgeneralized as evangelicals -- were to transforming Gov. Bush to President Bush. Maybe the machine that Falwell and Robertson and Dobson made is wearing out, but can a Republican actually attain the presidency without their backing?

This article was cross-posted at The God Blog.

Posted by Brad Greenberg at June 9, 2008 12:14PM | Comments (14)

Now that Peter Enns’s suspension from Westminster Theological Seminary on account of his 2005 book, Inspiration and Incarnation, has gone into effect, the tenured professor has begun to post “thoughts, musings, interactions, responses…about or inspired by the book” on his blog.

At the request of Westminster, he submitted a 38-page paper responding to his critics:

My original intention was simply to leave the matter where it was, in the hands of the faculty and board, so as not to draw undo [sic] attention to seminary matters (even though I felt that this paper would have proved helpful to numerous readers). As it stands now, the attention drawn to this issue is quite pervasive, comes from various sources, and without any aid from me.

In light of these developments, reproducing certain portions of that paper makes a degree of sense.

What he is posting now are discussions with (and responses to) his critics and an abridged and appended version of the parts of his paper that he feels best relate to the theological discussion.

Here's Enns on the authority of Scripture:

That an emphasis, etc., on the humanity of Scripture somehow compromises biblical authority is not only wrong, it also fails to capture the intention or content of I&I. To put it directly, neither I nor I&I deny, implicitly, functionally, or any other way, biblical authority. To put it even more directly, biblical authority is not the topic of I&I.

On the Westminster Confession:

To expect [the Westminster Confession of Faith] to give the final word on, say, Genesis and [Ancient Near East] literature or the [New Testament] and Second Temple literature (to name just two general issues), even in principle, strains credulity and places a greater burden on this tremendous document than it can bear, and may in fact come very close to making it, rather than Scripture, the final court of appeal.

On inerrancy:

If I may offer a thumbnail definition, the Bible as it is is without error because the Bible as it is is God’s Word.

And on his intended audience:

I&I is aimed at lay readers for whom a commitment to Scripture as God’s Word is deep and non-negotiable, but for whom things like the historical context of Scripture have been posed to them as a threat to inspiration, and therefore to the Bible as being God’s word. This is a very real, and we feel often neglected, population of evangelicalism.

The board will decide whether to terminate Enns’ employment by December 2008.

Previous articles from Christianity Today and Books & Culture about Enns include:
Westminster Theological Suspension | Peter Enns's book Inspiration and Incarnation created a two-year theological battle that resulted in his suspension. (April 1, 2008)
Two Testaments, One Story | Top evangelical scholars team up for landmark commentary on New Testament use of Old Testament. (February 8, 2008)
Messy Revelation | Why Paul would have flunked hermeneutics. (Books & Culture’s review of Inspiration and Incarnation)

Posted by Susan Wunderink at June 9, 2008 11:59AM | Comments (0)

For the past couple of days, an article on the demise of foreign language programs at colleges and universities has been among the Chronicle of Higher Education’s most-read pieces. (Chronicle articles requires a subscription; for free reading on the same topic, check out this U.S. News & World Report blog entry.)

Such programs, it appears, are feeling the pressure from two directions. On one side is the ongoing movement to abandon liberal arts in favor of professional and business programs geared to the marketplace; on the other, an impulse among college deans to emphasize more politically oriented (and politically correct, perhaps) programs on cultural studies.

This second impulse makes it easy to drop Spanish classes in favor of courses where students read about Che Guevara, Hugo Chavez, and Evo Morales (all in English, naturally). As the article’s authors write, “[T]he abandonment of [languages] . . . implies that art and literature do not matter unless they can be turned into surrogate politics. ‘Relevance’ these days is understood in an extremely narrow sense.”

Yet foreign languages are as needed today as they were 50 years ago, both for doing business and for promoting intercultural understanding. As members of a religious movement that is increasingly based outside of the West, a movement that has always crossed cultural and linguistic boundaries with the Good News of Jesus Christ, evangelicals ought to feel particularly pained by this loss of foreign-language education. After all, we look forward to a day when “every nation, tribe, people, and language” will worship before God’s throne together. We are, by identity, mission, and goal, people of many languages.

One of the truisms I heard repeated often during my time working with Wycliffe Bible Translators was that language was the bedrock identifier of any culture, and that preserving languages was the best way to preserve cultures. Canceling a German program at the University of Southern California won’t harm the Federal Republic of Germany, of course. But it does harm us. Here’s hoping that some colleges and universities will buck the trend.

Posted by Madison Trammel at June 5, 2008 5:29PM | Comments (9)

Geneticist Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project, last week stepped down from the post after 15 years. The geneticist and his team mapped the human genome in 2003, opening the door to personalized medical treatments--and to other, perhaps more sinister outcomes, such as discrimination based on one's genetic makeup. But Collins experienced a significant triumph last month with passage of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, which, according to Scientific American, "prohibits health insurers and employers from canceling or denying coverage or hiking premiums based on one's genetic risk of developing a certain disease."

In a 2001 interview with CT, Collins said of his work:

I think the genome project is a way of accumulating knowledge, and knowledge does not have moral value. Knowledge is neither good nor evil; it's just knowledge. It's information. The application that we make of that knowledge takes on a moral character.

Posted by Stan Guthrie at June 4, 2008 9:48AM | Comments (7)

I was at a wedding Saturday, and by the time I returned to my computer the next day, Barack Obama's split from Trinity United Church of Christ was as appetizing as a cup of cold coffee, reported ad nauseum on the cover of the LA Times, on NPR, in the NY Times and everywhere else.

This didn't come as much of a surprise considering the steady stream of bad news from the church's pulpit, and it overshadowed a much more interesting story this weekend involving Christianity and Obama. (The fact it has received little attention has a lot more to do with the media's bloodlust than news judgment.) Toward the end of news conference Saturday a reporter asked, "Can you give us some context of how your spirituality, your practice of religion factors into your decision making process as a leader, as a politician?"

I've stated over and over that I believe the marriage between religion and politics is a precarious, insincere affair. But this reporter asked just about the only relevant question on the topic. Here is Obama's response, courtesy of Time magazine and via the DMN religion blog:

Well, look, obviously as a Christian I believe in the values that are laid out in Scripture. I reflect on them often. I reflect on the lessons of Scripture as I’m going through the day. I pray frequently. I wrestle with doubts and try to figure out whether I’m doing the right thing, am I operating in an honest and moral way that is true to my religious precepts? Sometimes I may falter. So I guess the point is, I approach my work or I guess my faith is part of everything that I do. And I don’t think there’s a clear separation between my faith and how I try to live my life. And I certainly think that part of my motivation in the work that I do is a belief in what I consider the core precept of Christianity in addition to Christ dying for your sins and that is treating your brothers and sisters as you would have them treat you. A sense of empathy and a belief in the golden rule. And that’s what I try to apply to my work and what I do every day.

In this, Obama says very little while saying a lot. But, reading between the lines, it is apparent that while Barack Obama may be a religious man, he is not selling his presidential bid as one ordained by God. Religion to Obama seems to be something you practice, the way to communicate with God, even if you can't easily explain it to others. And that, rambling and Trinity-related rantings aside, is quite refreshing.

This article was cross-posted at The God Blog.

Posted by Brad Greenberg at June 3, 2008 8:35PM | Comments (42)

Saddleback church's Rick Warren and his wife Kay have never been shy about using computer technology to get out the messages of their respective books (mega-seller "Purpose Driven Life" and Kay's new book, "Dangerous Surrender").

But a new opportunity opened up recently with their joint appearance at Gordon College, Wenham, Mass., near Boston, where Rick delivered the graduation commencement address.

Gordon President Jud Carlberg and his wife Jan separately video-interviewed Rick and Kay respectively and the full interviews (as well as the commencement address) are now featured at:

Gordon's i Tunes U.

During the commencement address, Gordon College notes:

[Warren] said students should invest their lives in things that will last such as God's Word and human relationships. "It's not the duration of your life that matters, it's the donation."

At the end of May, I spent time with both Warrens at Saddleback church during the recent 2008 Purpose Driven Community Gathering, where Rick launched PEACE 2.0, an updated version of the PEACE Plan he launched several years ago.

At Saddleback, the Warrens have an unusual ability to put people at ease and insert humor into situations. At one point during the three-day event, Rick made a comment about his own marriage when suddenly Kay (off-stage in the green room) walked on stage and comically threw a shoe across the stage at him. Of course, they kissed and made up, but the laughter that resulted added a human touch.

Later on, during an evening breakout session on HIV and Christian ministry (or rather the lack thereof), Kay invited a church-goer with HIV to share his story on the spot. For the first time in public, he admitted to being HIV positive and that he had been "hiding in the pew" for years, not telling anyone. His message to pastors was a simple one: Don't suppose your own church doesn't have people like him.

It was a powerful witness.

Why are so many Christian leaders critical of Saddleback's strategies?

Posted by Tim Morgan at June 3, 2008 12:06PM | Comments (8)

One day after Sen. Barack Obama announced that he and his family were leaving Trinity United Church of Christ, the Rev. Michael Pfleger, the politically outspoken, white priest of St. Sabina Roman Catholic Church in Chicago’s South Side, apologized for comments he made last Sunday, May 25, as Trinity’s guest preacher. Among those comments, made public last week in a YouTube video, were that Hillary Clinton’s infamous tears were from her fear that a black man might take the presidency, and that “America is the greatest sin against God” for its perpetual racism.

The Chicago Tribune reported that the firebrand priest showed an “unusually contrite and cautious” attitude at yesterday’s Mass as he appealed to his parishioners for forgiveness:

“I apologize for the words that I chose. I apologize for my dramatization that was, for many people who do not know me, simply typical dramatics I often use in sermons. . . . I apologize for anyone who was offended and who thought it to be mockery, that was neither my intent, nor my heart.”

Meanwhile, Trinity UCC’s Sunday service saw the passing of the baton from Jeremiah Wright to the Rev. Otis Moss III, who has been preparing to take Wright’s role for over a year. As some 2,000 worshipers entered the sanctuary, they received pamphlets penned by Moss titled “The Declaration of Interdependence.” The pamphlet was in part meant to provide emotional support after a wearying six months for Trinity’s members. It read:

“We, the community of Trinity, are concerned, hurt, shocked, dismayed, frustrated, fearful and heartbroken. . . . Our hearts break at this moment and my limited vocabulary is inadequate to describe the range of emotions flooding our spirits at this time. We are caught, it seems, in a strange Greek tragic-comedy. In the words of Jean Paul-Sartre, with ‘no exit.’ We are a wounded people and the bruises from our encounter with history have scarred our very souls.”

Neither Sen. Obama nor the two pastors' incendiary sermons were mentioned in Trinity’s service yesterday.

Obama announced Saturday that he was leaving the church in part because "every time something is said in the church by anyone associated with Trinity, including guest pastors, the remarks will imputed to me even if they totally conflict with my long-held views.” The 20-year member of Trinity is now about 65 delegates short of receiving the Democratic nomination.

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Posted by Katelyn Beaty at June 2, 2008 2:08PM | Comments (11)