Tag Archives: Philosophy of Religion

Billy Abraham: Eulogies, Laughter, Loyal Opposition

Note from the Editor: The sudden news of Dr. William Abraham’s death sent Methodists around the globe reeling. Immediately, a flood a tributes began to pour forth in a kind of spontaneous online wake. Before Covid, wakes were still common in Ireland and also in Northern Ireland, Billy Abraham’s childhood home. In the remembrances that follow, four unique voices give tribute to the well-known scholar, preacher, and writer, joining the friends and colleagues gathering digitally who have instinctively touched on the loudest parts of traditional wakes – raucous laughter, robbed lament.

Dr. Billy Abraham

That is one theme that threads through stories, memories, hilarity, and loss – the sense of being robbed. Robbed of the opportunity to say goodbye; robbed of the opportunity to clear the air; robbed of the opportunity to say thank you. Robust affirmation of the resurrection of the dead does not lessen the shock of sudden loss, does not blunt that very human sense that something dear was stolen.

Like C.S. Lewis, Billy Abraham was a son of Northern Ireland who went on to study at Oxford. The same year that Billy “was selected to matriculate into Portora Royal School in his hometown,” 1955, Basil Mitchell succeeded C.S. Lewis as President of the Oxford Socratic Club. Around twenty years later, Billy began his doctoral work on philosophical theology at Oxford under the direction of Basil Mitchell. And if anything characterized the primary currents in which Abraham’s thinking sailed, it was the imperative that drove that famously lively club – to “follow the argument wherever it leads.” This intellectual habit requires confidence in truth and reason, yet it also requires discipline to pursue unflinchingly. If anything else characterized the strongest currents of Abraham’s intellectual navigation, it was the ability to engage in – and enjoy – rowdy debate with collegiality.

Lewis knew the importance of these disciplines in general and for people of faith in particular, famously commenting, “In any fairly large and talkative community such as a university there is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together into coteries where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form rumour that the outsiders say thus and thus. The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by group hostility. Each group hears not the best, but the worst, that the other groups can say. In the Socratic all this was changed. Here a man could get the case for Christianity without all the paraphernalia of pietism and the case against it without the irrelevant sansculottisme of our common anti-God weeklies. At the very least we helped to civilize one another.”

It is difficult to conceive of a more timely commentary for those who live in the United States, and it is worth noting that Lewis made this observation on the nature of community and coterie long before social media or the internet could easily be blamed. The Christian who argues with civility should not be an endangered species. And disagreement isn’t inherently uncivil.

Where Americans sometimes found themselves surprised by Abraham was often in this very sphere. Those who knew him to be orthodox were sometimes surprised by his intellectual freedom – caught off-guard when his quickly lilting accent slipped in a reference to the Holy Spirit as “she,” and perhaps unaware of the ancient tradition he was following. Those who knew him to prize the message of holiness were sometimes surprised when they expected a teetotaler and found a bottle of red wine. Those who knew of his theology – not only anthropology but also epistemology – were surprised when they expected hostility and were met with a friendly offer to get dinner.

There is rich freedom in intellectual honesty – in following the argument wherever it leads; and there is rewarding freedom in the ability to engage in rowdy debate with good-natured collegiality that isn’t precious with its participation. Any who are tempted to mine Abraham for the convenience or prestige of his doctrinal alignment without subjecting themselves to those same rigorous intellectual habits will find it puzzling as to why the relative scope of influence varies considerably. He did not require the soothing, damning chorus of an echo chamber, nor did he buckle to the fear that practicing common decency would be perceived as liberal drift.

If the Church in North America needs the movement of the Holy Spirit, it also needs the fruits of the Spirit as they are lived out in the intellectual life: love of the truth, joy in studying it and in the existence of friends and opponents alike, peace that reason well-employed is a gift from God, patience in crafting thoughts carefully and in giving others space to change their minds, kindness toward those who don’t fight fair or who have been mocked by your side, goodness in loving the ethical working out of belief, faithfulness to Christ over base red meat or crowd, gentleness with whomever has less advantage than you do, and self-control in speech, in loves, in choices, and in action.

When those grieving his loss feel robbed, it is in part because he influenced so many scholars, members of the clergy, and laity (he was a steadfast Sunday school teacher, not the least of his contributions to the Church) on a very personal level at vulnerable points in their professional or spiritual lives. But those grieving his loss feel robbed in part because in some way, from some angle, he showed us how to be better. Better thinkers, better colleagues, better friends, better opponents, better Christians.

As I told a friend, “he made me want to be better without ever making me feel small.”

My friend Maxie Dunnam, Founding Editor of Wesleyan Accent, is mourning the loss of his close friend. In the following, we share reflections on the contributions and character of Billy Abraham from a member of the clergy and from academics; from those who generally shared his perspectives, and importantly from one mourning his loss who sometimes disagreed with him profoundly. It would be a disservice to the scope of his influence to overlook those friendships characterized by mutual respect and genuine affection that also stood in the difficult tension of that old phrase, “the loyal opposition.”

In raucous laughter and robbed lament, we honor our feisty departed friend.

Elizabeth Glass Turner, Managing Editor

Dr. Abraham’s funeral is scheduled for October 30, 2021, in Dallas. It will be livestreamed; find more information here.

Dr. Joy Moore, VP for Academic Affairs & Academic Dean; Professor of Biblical Preaching, Luther Seminary

I am grateful to join the chorus of witnesses sharing individual expressions of how our lives were among the many influenced by one. I am embarrassed to say my first recognition of  “exactly” who William Abraham was came years after I had publicly stolen a story from him. (No, this is not a preacher’s prerogative; and in all honesty, I had no idea the source of the illustration was sitting in the audience as I used his metaphor to underscore my point!)

When I finally did connect the dots, it provided an underscore to the kind of person Billy was: he never mentioned my faux pas. Instead, Billy shared his wisdom and perspective, providing me guidance as I made personal and professional decisions that would shape how I served the church and the academy. I will forever be grateful this author became a real person and friend in my life! Billy once introduced me before I spoke at a gathering with an honest evaluation of my style and substance that conveyed his knowledge of me was more than a superficial greeting at conferences or reading of my resume (yes, I shamelessly acknowledge that, because who wouldn’t want to say Billy Abraham introduced them publicly?).

I met Billy shortly after I began my doctoral work. His engagement with my then-incipient ideas provided soil that nurtured those seedling thoughts. Over the years of many stimulating conversations, Billy’s challenge, conviction, confession, and collegiality bore witness to truth-telling, tenacity, testimony, and tenderness that, for me, embodied a Wesleyan witness. As enchanting it was to hear theology expressed with an Irish twang (he did land in Texas), Billy captivated our imaginations with a confessional-critical interrogation of institutional and individual claims to a Wesleyan Christian practice that calls for a biblical imagination, theological integrity, and personal piety that boldly proclaims the faith in the Triune God.

As we pause together to grieve our loss and celebrate the gift of Billy’s presence in our lives, may each of us be challenged to live our lives with the integrity we experienced with Billy: lifting others to find their place at the table; examining, interrogating, and calling out claims of what is truth; and pointing always and only to Jesus.

Dr. Jerry Walls, Professor of Philosophy; Scholar-in-Residence, Houston Baptist University

Billy Abraham was trained in analytic philosophy at Oxford.  More recently, he was recognized as one of the senior spokesmen for “analytic theology,” a movement that applies the techniques of analytic philosophy to the discipline of theology.  The aim of analytic theology is to promote rigor and clarity of argument in the discipline. This emphasis is apparent in a number of Billy’s books, but I will highlight two examples.

First is his volume from several years ago entitled Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology: From the Fathers to Feminism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).  The very title of this hefty volume signals the important distinction that Billy wanted to clarify and defend, namely, a distinction between recognized canonical lists and epistemic criteria. A clear sense of this distinction is crucial to the argument, and Abraham lays it out for us at the very outset and reiterates it throughout his work.  An ecclesial canon is essentially a means of grace, whereas an epistemic norm is essentially a criterion of rationality, justification, and knowledge.

To accent this distinction, Billy takes pains to remind us of the complex canonical heritage of the Church.  For Protestants, the notion is associated almost exclusively with the canon of Scripture, but as Billy points out, there are several other kinds of canonical tradition deserving of recognition.  These include baptismal and Eucharistic rites, liturgical traditions, iconographic traditions, lists of saints and teachers designated as fathers and mothers of the Church, and finally, the episcopacy as a means of supervision.

 As Billy notes, however, there is considerable ambiguity surrounding the very meaning of canon.  At one level, the word simply designates a list of books or other material.  However, it can also signify some sort of standard which is used to measure and judge various doctrines, practices, and the like. This latter understanding of canon obviously has epistemic connotations and significance absent from the more modest notion of a list.  Not surprisingly, Billy prefers the more modest notion and believes it better preserves the intended function of canonical material as means of grace which initiate us into the life of God and transform us morally and spiritually.

It is worth noting that the “Wesleyan quadrilateral” is an interesting instance of this very confusion between canonical lists and epistemic criteria.  Whereas Scripture and tradition represent canonical lists, reason and experience are classic instances of epistemic norms.

The second example I will cite is his recently published four volume work entitled Divine Agency and Divine Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017-2021). Billy began working on this project over ten years ago, when he and I were both fellows in the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame. Billy and I shared an apartment that year, which was a delight in itself.  Billy came to Notre Dame with a more modest plan, as he notes in the acknowledgments of the recently published fourth volume: “I had originally planned to write but one volume; within a month of my arrival at the university of Notre Dame it had sprouted into four.” Billy never hesitated to explore any relevant issues that arose in the course of his research, and it was a delight to watch him as he realized he had to put aside his original plan to write one volume and instead to produce four!

While philosophical issues frame the entire four-volume set, they are particularly emphasized in the first volume entitled “Exploring and Evaluating the Debate.” Billy notes there that much of the talk about divine action in contemporary theology is vague and elusive, hardly suited to do justice to the extraordinary claims of traditional Christianity. In contrast to all of this, he forthrightly defends a robust account of divine action that allows us to affirm unequivocally that Christ was born of a virgin, was raised from the dead, and will come again.

It is worth emphasizing that Billy wrote with grace, elegance, and winsome humor.  Many of his books are accessible to thoughtful lay readers who could read them with great profit.

Rev. Dana Coker, Senior Pastor, First UMC Bonham, Bonham Texas

Billy Abraham is often misunderstood by people that don’t know him well.  I also think he contributes to this misunderstanding. Part of the way he captured and kept our attention was by saying things in a creatively dramatic fashion. It was often hilarious if you happened to agree with him and anger inciting if you didn’t. I think, for Billy, it was worth it to make people mad because it frequently led to great debate and teaching opportunities. However, if this is the only side of Billy Abraham you knew (especially if you had lots of disagreements with him), well then, you just didn’t know Billy.

He was kind and attentive. Billy always looked me in the eye and was not only preceptive enough to notice if I seemed off, he would take the time to inquire and pray for me.

He was patient and generous.  Many of the conversations that literally helped shape who I am, only happened because he was generous with his time.  He made me feel welcome to come talk about whatever was on my mind in his office…or at his second office, La Madeleine.

He was a master at seeing potential and drawing it out.  He believed in me before I did, and he seemed so happy to watch me find my theological footing.

His curiosity created an openness in him, but I only perceived his openness when he felt he was only among friends. After class one day, I told him he was wrong about something he said in class about a group of people, and miraculously I was briefly able to out debate the great debater.  In amused frustration at his now grinning friend, he threw an eraser at me as I was walking out the door triumphantly.  I few hours later, he poked his head into the room where I always studied and said, “You were right.  I repent.”

In recent years, many things that he wrote and said publicly have been hurtful to me.  Though Billy has said otherwise, there are people on both sides of the Methodist divide for whom scripture and the creeds are the backbone of their faith. He has too frequently compared the very best version of his side of the divide with the very worst version of the other side. Honesty escapes you, if you don’t see both misbehavior and great integrity and faithfulness on both sides.

I was upset with him. I was mulling over how I would start the conversation with him. I’m sure it would have been an extra lively debate. In fact, there might have been some tears, at least on my part, but I have no doubt it would have been a loving exchange. 

Rest in peace, my friend!  You have blessed my life and ministry, and I will forever be grateful!

Dr. Jackson Lashier, Associate Professor of Religion; Chair, Social Science Division, Southwestern College

The news of the recent death of William J. (Billy) Abraham affected me deeply. I have so appreciated reading many of the tributes to his life written by his former students and colleagues; he was certainly an extraordinary man. Unlike many of my friends in the Methodist world, I did not know Dr. Abraham personally, so my sense of loss is less personal though still profound. His impact on my life, as for numerous other professors, theologians, and pastors, came through his theological work.

I read Canon and Criterion in Christian Theology, his most well-known book, in a systematic theology class in my first year at seminary. At the time, I was a sola scriptura Protestant Christian who thought that church history skipped from the Apostle Paul to Martin Luther and that “canon” was a weapon used in early American wars. I used scripture as little more than a justification for my particular beliefs and figured the purpose of this theology class was simply to strengthen those justifications. I was, therefore, a little skeptical when first engaging this work, not least of all for its comprehensive argument and sheer length.

But Dr. Abraham’s winsome way, no less present in his writing than in his speech, gradually won a hearing and, perhaps providentially, Canon and Criterion toppled all of my assumptions coming into that class and more generally seminary. Through reading this book—under the skillful and patient guidance of my professor, Dr. Chuck Gutenson, himself a student of Dr. Abraham’s—I came to see how impoverished my understanding of scripture and the theological disciplines were. Scripture was not simply a justification of a set of beliefs, Dr. Abraham argues, but a “means of grace” given to us by God “to initiate us into the divine life” (53). What an infinitely more beautiful and compelling image of the Holy Scriptures!

Moreover, Dr. Abraham showed me that scripture was not the only means of grace so given by God, but rather, the canonical tradition of the Church included a whole host of means, including the sacraments, creeds, iconography, saints and church fathers and mothers, and the like. Not only is it appropriate to utilize these means as Protestants, it is necessary if we are to become the disciples God calls us to be. After I finished reading the book, I wanted to know what these other means of grace were and I wanted to read scripture like Billy Abraham did.

I’ve come to realize that Canon and Criterion shifted my whole perspective not just on the purpose of scripture and the other canonical materials but also on theological education. It opened me up to the formative practices of heart and mind on offer at seminary. It helped me to realize that I wasn’t in seminary simply to gain some more good arguments for my particular brand of Christianity or even to gain a better understanding of the scriptural foundations of my beliefs and practices. Rather, I was in seminary to be formed as a disciple of Christ, to be further initiated into the life of God. So too did my understanding of the role of a pastor change, from a person who makes arguments and reflections on scripture to a person who, using the canonical materials, helps initiate others into the life of God.

Finally, Dr. Abraham’s tantalizing introduction to these canonical materials, what he calls a “grand symphony…which leads ineluctably into the unfathomable, unspeakable mystery of the living God” (55), set me on a course of study that changed my vocation. It took me into a study of early Church history, the formation of the creeds, and the lives of the saints, a course of study I am pursuing to this day as a professor and writer. Now I want to teach and write like Billy Abraham, though I harbor few allusions that this is the case. From what I have read and continue to read of his, and from what I know from friends who took his classes, Dr. Abraham stood alone.

Precisely because the Church’s canonical tradition is a grand symphony of harmonious parts, Dr. Abraham suggests that it is never fully closed. Rather, he writes, “new canonical materials and practices can be developed to enrich the life of faith so long as they fit naturally and appropriately with the canonical tradition already in place” (55). If this is true, certainly Dr. Abraham’s person and work now passes into the grand symphony; his work has so clearly served as a means of grace in my own life and in the lives of countless others. Well done, good and faithful servant.

Featured image of Queen’s University, Belfast, courtesy K. Mitch Hodge via Unsplash.

Aaron Duvall ~ Good God: The Problem of Morality

Why do we sense that some things are intuitively unjust, unfair, or even inhuman? What drives our common appeal to an unspoken or implicit set of “rules” for living? What insights can we find in the New Testament to shine light on this general sense in humanity that some things are right and others are wrong? This weekend’s sermon is from Rev. Aaron Duvall, who explores the basis of our moral impulses. It begins at minute marker 1:00.

Aaron Perry ~ Desire and Duty in Everyday Life: The Narrative of Ethics

C.S. Lewis argued that before writing a story, two elements must be considered: desire and duty. The story begins with the Author’s desire. Something captures the author that he or she needs to get out. Before the writing process begins, however, the story should be considered for its value as well. So consider the would-be storywriter from two angles: the Author and the Person. The would-be writer as a Person must answer not only, “Do I want to write this?” but also, “Should the story be written?” The story can only emerge if the writer has a desire, and the story should only be written if it contributes to the benefit of humankind (duty). Both desire and duty are necessary for this free action to be rightfully taken.

Much popular ethical reflection still begins with desire: what does the “Author” of one’s own life want? However, the check or restriction on one’s desire is almost never the “Person’s” duty. Instead, desire is checked only by how one’s desire impacts the desires of another. The result is a spirit of permissiveness as long as one’s desires do not hinder another’s desires.

But duty still sneaks into the conversation. Think about how often you hear people say that they “owe it to themselves” or need to “be true to themselves” or “deserve to get my rights.” These phrases communicate something important about ethical deliberation. The individual cannot be swallowed up by the community entirely; however, without an objective reality (whether family, community, the Divine, a friend), duty crumples into a simple reaffirmation of subjective desire. Duty to oneself – “I owe it to myself” – is moral language repurposed to express individual desire. In effect, we become our own standards of right and wrong: your moral duty is to identify and fulfill your desire. 

In postmodernity, a common move has been to find others with similar desires. Intentionally or not, one may then ground the pursuit of one’s own desire as duty to this community. In this way, desire is carefully hidden in the name of duty for one’s community. In case this feels abstract, consider how the mindset has impacted political communities. The postmodern political move has been to galvanize these communities linked by desire, using the underlying fear of tyranny from those who are “not like us” or whose desires are different. It’s not a phobia: human beings do master and control one another on big and small scales. The final result is communities of desire with self-justifying duty against other communities of desire with self-justifying duty. This complexity then requires a political solution who breaks in from beyond. Hail the political hero who is “not an insider,” who is “just like one of us.”

In contrast to this kind of politics, the Christian narrative teaches that there is no true outsider except for Jesus: the one whose life truly reveals ourselves and whose life truly reveals God; the one who so truly reveals because he is both God and human. In him, desire and duty are unified: his duty to the Father is his desire, and his desire to please the Father through the power of the Spirit drives his faithfulness to his duty.

Here the Christian community, especially in the local church, provides a correcting and prophetic word to other political allegiances. The unity of the church doesn’t come from shared desires with other members: the unity of the church is in its leader. There is membership not in what is owed to ourselves, but in what is owed to Christ because we are now in him. The local church provides an all too flesh-and-blood community that puts us in covenant relationship to other people in Christ not simply in the abstract, but concretely to the man or woman in the seat next to us at our small group or in worship. The politics of allegiance in the church is not simply of desire, but of duty to one another—the actual person—in Christ.

The Christian story, in the form of this community, does not merely affirm that Jesus is the Savior, but that through Christ we will be conformed to his image, too: our lives, from the inside out, will be remade, and any split between desire and duty perfectly healed.

Wesleyan Accent ~ Not Yet Fully Awake: Dr. Matthew Milliner

Note from the Editor: As Christians continue into Eastertide, Wesleyan Accent is pleased to share this profound Easter sermon by art history professor Dr. Matthew Milliner, which was preached in All Souls Church in Wheaton, Illinois. You can see more from him here.

He is risen! He is risen indeed!

It’s exciting news when the most brilliant disciple of the atheist Sigmund Freud sees the need for belief in God. As many of you know, the name of this student was Carl Jung, and there is a lot one can learn from him. But here is one thing he really got wrong: “It is funny,” Jung tells us, “that Christians are still so pagan that they understand spiritual existence only as a body and as a physical event. I am afraid our Christian cannot maintain this shocking anachronism any longer.”

And so having cited this unfortunate remark of the great Swiss psychiatrist, please indulge me again, maybe with an Alleluia at the end this time.

He is risen. He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

The field of Biblical studies is wonderful. You can learn all kinds of things about the Ancient Near Eastern and Graeco-Roman contexts in which the Biblical books were originally written, you can learn the original languages. But as in any field, some people in Biblical studies make some miscalculations. I speak of the Biblical scholar Gerd Lüdemann: “A consistent modern view must say farewell to the resurrection as a historical event.”

Having heard that, please indulge me once again.

He is risen. He is risen indeed, Alleluia!

The notion that you can keep Christianity without resurrection has aged about as well as pay phones, in-flight ash trays, spitoons, hoop skirts, zuit suits, and those massive televisions that we used to have to cram in our living room and the gargantuan pieces of furniture we used to hide them before the flat screens came along.  You still sometimes see those huge TVs on the curb, usually with five garbage stickers on them because no one wants them!  And who would want a Christianity without resurrection either?

It’s often said if the resurrection isn’t true, don’t go to church, go to brunch. Well I was at one of those Chicago brunch meccas just this week and I overheard the bartenders planning the cocktail menu for this Sunday – Easter morning. And they said, “We need to mix up our menu to bring people in.” One employee said, we could change up the Bloody Mary with a bloodless Mary, which I guess is some kind of cocktail. And how I wish I had had the courage to say then and there, “Sounds like perfect cocktail for someone without resurrection hope on Easter Morning! Bloodless Mary.” But because he is risen we’re not at brunch, we’re here instead to drink from the veins of the risen Christ, and today at least we’re throwing in brunch too. 

I’m sure you know the great John Updike poem, Seven Stanzas at Easter:

Make no mistake: if he rose at all

it was as His body;

if the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecules

reknit, the amino acids rekindle,

the Church will fall.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,

analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,

making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded

credulity of earlier ages:

let us walk through the door.

Or better than Updike’s poem is this bald statement of fact in 1 Cor. 15; “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.”  Or Acts 10: “We are witnesses to all that he did… They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day.” That is not a pious sentiment, a clever aphorism, haiku or a sonnet – it’s journalism. They killed him, God fixed it, says St. Peter.

One reason that resurrection matters is because it addresses our root anxiety. There are a lot of surface anxieties in our lives, and some that cut a good bit below the surface. But if you follow those anxieties to their root, and ask yourself, “what’s the worst thing that could happen?” The answer tends to be: “somebody could die.” That’s about as bad as it could get. And that root anxiety of our impermanence is what drives so many of our worries, agendas and sins – and so the root anxiety is the one Jesus addresses this morning not just by his words but with his body, by conquering death and replacing it with the root peace of the risen Christ.

That root peace is why Roger Persons, a member of our congregation, when his wife Jean died while they were watching TV together, was able to address her then and there and say, “Walk with the king.” That root peace is why Jason Long and I, sitting at the top of Central Dupage Hospital with Brett Foster as the sunset beamed into the hospital room so strongly that I had to put on my sunglasses, felt strangely, in retrospect, like Brett was preparing us for our own deaths as well. When I think of Brett, my memory now skips from that hospital room to his funeral where we heard these words from the Orthodox poet, Scott Cairns, about the resurrection – not Jesus’ resurrection, but mine and yours. 

…one morning you finally wake

to a light you recognize as the light you’ve wanted

every morning that has come before. And the air

itself has some light thing in it that you’ve always

hoped the air might have. And One is there

to welcome you whose face you’ve looked for during all

the best and worst times of your life. He takes you to himself

and holds you close until you fully wake.

And in our gospel passage, Mary of course – like all of us on this side of death – is not yet fully awake. She makes first contact with the resurrected Jesus, and it’s about as awkward as Peter embarrassing himself by trying to pitch a tent on Mount Tabor. Mary’s problem is that she thinks Jesus is dead, and when she sees that he’s gone, she consoles herself by saying, “they have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.”

I wonder if it’s her root anxiety in the form of a sentence. It signifies confusion, frustration and maybe even a little panic. I almost imagine her wandering off in a daze reciting those words in some kind of stupor. “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” Then the disciples show up, Peter and John. And of course, the best illustration I know of that moment in all the world is a train ride away at the Art Institute of Chicago. It’s by the African American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner. It shows Peter kind of concerned, almost twiddling his thumbs because he knew he blew it – and John, the beloved disciple has this beaming look on his face, as if to say, “I knew it!”  Tanner suffered from racial prejudice all his life – he believed in resurrection. Still, in our passage, neither Peter nor John stick around.

But Mary wanders back, still clinging to the best she can do under the circumstances. Call her the Bloodless Mary, wringing her hands as she repeats, “they have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” And then she gets what we all think would work for us if only it would happen: an angelic visitation. “She bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet.” I hope you’re catching that this is a reference to the ark of the covenant – two angels surrounding a void of presence – the absence that signifies that God cannot be contained. And the angels, puzzled, say to her, “woman, why are you weeping?”

And her reply? “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” The presence of the angels doesn’t clear up her confusion, so the Lord himself explains it to her. “She turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Now that is a reference to the mystical treaties the Song of Solomon if there ever was one – God’s pursuit of the soul. “Whom are you looking for?” God asks this to all of us this morning.

But it doesn’t work! Mary thinks he’s the gardener. And she offers her good intentions and pious objectives one more time. “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.”  She still clings to her pre-resurrection agenda. On Friday one of our speakers said that Jesus was LOUD on the cross and I think he’s loud here too.  He has to be loud enough to snap her out of her pious plans to anoint his corpse. And so he shouts with a smile, “Mary!”

There have been a lot of good stories about Notre Dame de Paris this week, but here’s the best one I know of. Denise once told me that when she was there with her mother and sister, they were touring the Cathedral which was packed with tourists, when a mother lost her son. And my wife Denise knows the name of that boy, as does everyone who was in Notre Dame that day because the mother started to shout it. Dimitri!  After three shouts the packed cathedral fell silent but she kept shouting, no – screaming, “Dimitri! Dimitri!” until he was found. And that, after all, is what Notre Dame’s architecture is – it is the risen Christ shouting to you through beauty. Shouting your name and mine, trying to snap us out of our own agendas, even our own ambitions to serve him. That’s what beauty does, what pain does, what tragedy, suffering and joy do. They’re all the risen Christ shouting our name again and again in the Cathedral of this cosmos while the cathedral lasts.

And like Mary, we wake up, “Teacher!” and we cling to him, as any of us would. That’s what coming to church is about. But then comes Jesus’ famous lines to Mary: “Don’t hold onto me.” He does not mean back off. He tells her to stop clinging to him because he has something for her to do. Not her agenda this time but his. Namely, go tell the boys. In all four gospels the women are first, the only difference is the number of women who are present. And each gospel, the mission of the women is the same – and it is from them that we get the message with which we began.

He is risen: He is risen indeed. Alleluia!

Philip Tallon ~ Make Buildings that Won’t Be Burnt Up

A wise art teacher used to say, “Make art that won’t be burnt up.” He meant, make art that will outlast the last judgment. Make art that will count as one of the “glories of the nations” brought into the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21:26).

Like most people, I watched in horror as one of the glories of the nation of France was nearly burnt up last week. Someone put it well in Twitter, “Had to turn the tv off. Can’t take it anymore. Like watching someone in real time smashing everything in the Louvre with a sledgehammer.”

The world mourned in real time, only to discover in the following days that much of value survived. An early echo of Easter’s surprising good news, the medieval vaulting protected the sanctuary from much of the fire. If it were not for the much later addition of the spire, the damage to the inside would have been even less. My children will get to see Notre Dame’s sanctuary in much the same state as I have.

The news made much of the response of the French people. The French are marginally church-going and the country ranks as one of the least religious in the world. It is easy to imagine that France will be, in the near future, more meaningfully Muslim than Christian. Yet the world, and the French people, love this cathedral. In many ways it is the heart of Paris.

As the burning was happening I, of course, noticed the occasional dunking on church-obsession by Christians and secularists, for opposite reasons. The Christians looked to score piety points by signaling that “the church is people, not buildings.” The secularists signaled superiority by (often mistakenly) noting that such churches were built on the scaffolding of injustice, superstition, and colonialism. There wasn’t much of this, though. It was mostly a unifying moment.

My thoughts turned to my own town. I wondered what sites here in Houston would warrant such an outcry with their bloodless destruction. The answer was easy: none. Few such places exist in the world. Few buildings are as grand or as famous as Notre Dame. The closest Houston comes to a landmark is its sad, abandoned Astrodome, which the city can’t bring itself to get rid of, but also has no use for. Our dome will never compare to “Our Dame.” We could try awfully hard and still fail to create such a work of beauty. There is, of course, the additional problem that we aren’t trying.

This week it so happened that I had the pleasure to lead a discussion on Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. As anyone familiar with the work will recall, much of what Burke bemoans is the way that the French revolution cut out the heart of civil life: the nobility and the church. Left with denuded rationality, Burke foresaw the likely result. Reason unaided by sentiment will quickly degrade into cruelty. And Burke was right. The reign of terror followed soon after the book’s publication. Despite its coincidental bearing on France, the part of the book that touched most directly on the burning of Notre Dame was a point that Burke made with reference to manners: “There ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.” The connection here between beauty and loyalty is apparent. Beauty attracts us, even when our reasons are unconvinced. When our nation’s politicians act in ugly ways, it helps that our nation’s capital is still beautiful.

The connection to Notre Dame is obvious. This troubled world still hungers for beauty, even as it has become confused about truth. On cloudy days it seems like the church only cares about truth and goodness (and sometimes not even those), but has left the beautiful to fend for itself. Our love of “Our Lady” reminds us of a truth that the builders knew: to help us love God the church ought to be lovely.


Elizabeth Glass Turner ~ The Terrible Precipice of Knowing: Black Holes, Enlightenment, and the Divine

There is a moment you stand on the brink, or the brink stands on you. The inexorable draw pulls you in, like gravity, like the current; at the moment you must fight to get away or be drawn in forever, you are the most tempted to pause with quickened breath as you weigh whether the knowledge of what lies on the other side is worth the possibility of your own extinction – before you can say what it is you’ve seen.

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.”

In the quest to see the truth, what if you are blinded? Is a blind woman happy who has lost her sight in order to bear witness to the Beatific vision? Would terrorist Saul have chosen blindness and disorientation to see Christ, or did Christ need to blind Saul temporarily so that he would perceive properly?

Today is an odd moment in human history; scientists have collaborated across continents, in multiple time zones, to set up equipment on the world’s mountains so that humanity can use plastic, metal, and glass tools that fit in your pocket or sit on your desk to communicate with each other almost instantaneously and see images of a black hole. Computing isn’t identical to information and information isn’t identical to knowledge, but today you can pull out a piece of equipment, use a high-powered search engine, type the words, “black hole photo,” and see the results of decades of hard work. Just 150 years ago people learned of the death of their loved one in the U.S. Civil War by checking the newspaper or receiving a letter from the dead person’s friend. It could take weeks, months. Now a mystery in our galaxy is viewable on the rechargeable machine in your pocket.

Black holes are mesmerizing, terrifying, and little understood. Using math, calculations, formulas, equations, scientists guess. What appears to be true is that, in a way, light itself can be sucked down the drain and condensed into a tiny, heavy ball with extraordinary gravitational pull. (Note: this is an inaccurate description of a complex reality by someone who is not a scientist.) What science fiction writers like to play with is the moment – the event horizon – in which light or matter (or a fictional character) can no longer escape the gravitational pull.

You still have time you still have time you still have time it’s too late.

Who can rescue you from knowledge that will be your undoing? No rescue craft can hover at the event horizon, lowering a rope to you.

How can knowledge burn but set you free? There is a knowing that singes you to breaking point, then propels you forward.

Where can I go from your Spirit?
    Where can I flee from your presence?
 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
    if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
    if I settle on the far side of the sea,
 even there your hand will guide me,
    your right hand will hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
    and the light become night around me,”
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
    the night will shine like the day,
    for darkness is as light to you.

Light, we are told, cannot escape the power of a black hole.

Perhaps not.

Or at least, perhaps not for a long, long time, until that condensed matter explodes outward – propelling, igniting, cascading.

Jesus swallowed up the darkness that appeared to swallow him. The darkness came close; the darkness thought that Jesus Christ stood on the event horizon, and fell in.

On this mountain he will destroy
    the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
     he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears
    from all faces;
he will remove his people’s disgrace
    from all the earth.
The Lord has spoken. – Isaiah 25:7-8

What is Holy Week about? It is about Jesus letting himself be drawn into a black hole. It is about the sky going dark, the earth shaking. It is about hours of eerie silence – hours and hours. It is about hope vanishing in the blink of an eye.

It is about a black hole quivering. It is about a black hole beginning to get smaller. It is about the Light of the World swallowing the heavy darkness with such inescapable draw that the darkness cannot escape. It is about the Light of the World entering a hole of black darkness and absorbing it from the inside.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Standing on the brink, looking into the abyss, Judas Iscariot and Pontius Pilate stood.

The inexorable draw pulls you in, like gravity, like the current; at the moment you must fight to get away or be drawn in forever, you are the most tempted to pause with quickened breath as you weigh whether the knowledge of what lies on the other side is worth the possibility of your own extinction – before you can say what it is you’ve seen.

What does it feel like to betray the Light? Judas held that knowledge. So too did Pilate. And it swallowed them whole as they were consumed by the ever-hungry darkness.

Standing on the brink, looking into the abyss, Mary the mother of James, Joanna, Mary Magdalene, and other women stood, peering into an open, empty, echoing tomb. Comprehension failed them. Lightning-colored beings shouted nearby from an eternity away. Fight or flight kicked in. Hope is deadly, and they did not want to die.

At the moment you must fight to get away or be drawn in forever, you are the most tempted to pause with quickened breath as you weigh whether the knowledge of what lies on the other side is worth the possibility of your own extinction.

Had Light escaped the darkness?

What does it feel like to witness the Light? Mary and Joanna held that knowledge. So too did Magdalene. And it swallowed them whole as they were consumed by the ever-lifegiving Light.

It is not the brink that is the problem; it is not the cliff’s edge, the event horizon; it’s whether you’re jumping into darkness or into Light. Holy Week brings us to the brink, reminds us of what it feels like to peer over the edge into humanity’s bent toward self-destruction, pushes us toward letting go of all safety railings as we free-fall into the Light of the World.

Featured image courtesy Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration/National Science Foundation.

Elizabeth Glass Turner ~ #notwithoutmychild

Today’s post is written alongside others delving into the moral, ethical, and biblical ramifications of the current practice in the United States of separating immigrant parents from their children. In it, we include reflections on the plight of children in the Old Testament; the plight of families in the Western hemisphere; and the ways in which Jesus, a Messiah who saw the suffering of families, stretched his followers’ moral imaginations.

It is also written with consciousness that this is not the first time parents and children in the United States have been separated from each other, as the history of Native Americans and the Black slave trade demonstrate.

Please feel free to share today’s post with the hashtags #notwithoutmychild and #familiesbelongtogether.

Children Adrift: The Old Testament

Now a man of the tribe of Levi married a Levite woman, and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. When she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him for three months. But when she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him.

Then Pharaoh’s daughter went down to the Nile to bathe, and her attendants were walking along the riverbank. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her female slave to get it. She opened it and saw the baby. He was crying, and she felt sorry for him. “This is one of the Hebrew babies,” she said. – Exodus 2:1-6

I do not think I’ve ever heard someone preach on the compassion of Pharoah’s daughter. She also strikes me as a savvy woman. She came face to face with a squalling infant who was suffering because of her father’s decree to kill the Hebrew infants and toddlers who could potentially pose a future threat to the Egyptian way of life. She probably surmised precisely who the young girl was half-hidden in the reeds near the basket. She knew it was a Hebrew baby; here was a nearby young girl. Not only did Moses’ birth mother get to raise him while he was young, she was now paid to do so. Yes, Pharoah’s daughter was compassionate, and savvy.

I don’t know if she was able to intervene in the fate of other little baby boys; maybe she saved the one she could. Maybe she was haunted by the fates of the ones she couldn’t.

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Early the next morning Abraham took some food and a skin of water and gave them to Hagar. He set them on her shoulders and then sent her off with the boy. She went on her way and wandered in the Desert of Beersheba.

When the water in the skin was gone, she put the boy under one of the bushes. Then she went off and sat down about a bowshot away, for she thought, “I cannot watch the boy die.” And as she sat there, she began to sob.

God heard the boy crying, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What is the matter, Hagar? Do not be afraid;God has heard the boy crying as he lies there. Lift the boy up and take him by the hand, for I will make him into a great nation.”

Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. So she went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink. God was with the boy as he grew up. He lived in the desert and became an archer. – Genesis 21:14-20

Hagar didn’t ask to sleep with Abraham. She was a servant, and Sarah, impatient and distrustful of God’s promise, lent her to Abraham. But Sarah couldn’t put away her jealousy of Hagar’s son, even after having her own. She wanted Hagar to go. Hagar didn’t get autonomy over her own body, and once she had a son, the injustices continued. With no secure future, she was sent away.

Yet what a tender passage we encounter: she is sobbing, she cannot bear the notion of watching her son die. And this little slave woman and her beloved son do not escape God’s notice. What’s the matter, Hagar? Don’t be afraid.

Later, Pharoah’s daughter will hear a young one crying and feel sorry for him. Here, God hears a young one crying under a bush, and responds as well.

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The king asked, “Is there no one still alive from the house of Saul to whom I can show God’s kindness?”

Ziba answered the king, “There is still a son of Jonathan; he is lame in both feet.” So King David had him brought from Lo Debar, from the house of Makir son of Ammiel. When Mephibosheth son of Jonathan, the son of Saul, came to David, he bowed down to pay him honor. David said, “Mephibosheth!” “At your service,” he replied.

“Don’t be afraid,” David said to him, “for I will surely show you kindness for the sake of your father Jonathan. I will restore to you all the land that belonged to your grandfather Saul, and you will always eat at my table.” Mephibosheth bowed down and said, “What is your servant, that you should notice a dead dog like me?”

Then the king summoned Ziba, Saul’s steward, and said to him, “I have given your master’s grandson everything that belonged to Saul and his family. You and your sons and your servants are to farm the land for him and bring in the crops, so that your master’s grandson may be provided for. And Mephibosheth, grandson of your master, will always eat at my table.” 

 And Mephibosheth lived in Jerusalem, because he always ate at the king’s table; he was lame in both feet. – II Samuel 9:3-13

Mephibosheth was five years old when the news about his dad and granddad came. While David was mourning the loss of his best friend, Jonathan, Jonathan’s son was being spirited away by his nurse, to protect him in the political upheaval; but in her hurry, Mephibosheth fell and was disabled the rest of his life: the little boy’s feet would never work again. On top of the tragedy of his father dying, he would equate receiving the news with the loss of being able to properly run, jump, and play.

Mephibosheth was a child of tragedy and grief, through no fault of his own. He didn’t ask to be in the middle of political upheaval; he didn’t choose his family, he wasn’t old enough to weigh in on their decisions.

But David wants to “show God’s kindness” to any lingering survivors of Saul’s line. He restores property; he ensures income and livelihood; he bestows honor by issuing a standing invitation to supper, any time. David can’t erase Mephibosheth’s past, but he can ensure a future of dignity and safety. And he can make sure that Mephibosheth’s family is provided for.

The cries of other sons had been heard by God, had been heard by a Pharoah’s daughter. David went searching for a child whose cries had faded, if the injuries to spirit and body had not.

In a basket; under a bush; in the arms of a nurse.

The lost children of the Old Testament were not overlooked by God.

Children Adrift: The Western Hemisphere

Currently in the United States of America, immigrant parents are being separated from their children. No law requires this.

It can be difficult for American citizens with quick access to WiFi to imagine life with dubious communication connections; frequently immigrants to the United States have incomplete or inaccurate information about what lies ahead, what policies they will face, how much money they’ll have to pay to whom.

Some parents are trying to get their kids away from cartel violence, food shortages, and political upheaval. In Venezuela, children are starving to death. In Guatemala, the raid of one workplace in the U.S. can directly affect the sustenance of an entire village.

Children Adrift: A Messiah for Families

In a time when Americans often suffer compassion fatigue, seeing footage of wildfires and hurricanes, volcano eruptions and war, school shootings and tragedy, we are called to step back and reflect. Frequently in the Gospels we read of a Messiah gone AWOL: frustrated disciples search high and low, scout around town, attempting to find Jesus. In these moments, he had always withdrawn to pray in quiet away from the frequent chaos that surrounded him.

When Jesus encountered people swept up in debate or confusion about ethics or religious laws or the will of God, he invited them into the insight and truth he centered on in those times of prayer. Often, he met their questions with stories.

“Who is my neighbor?”

“Once, a man was traveling…”

In these teaching moments, Jesus was stretching the moral imaginations of his hearers. He took them from a narrow question to a broad principle, by way of illustrating vivid characters. Jesus’ responses may as well have been prefaced with the phrase, “imagine this…”

Over on First Things, Jonathan Jones describes the strengths and virtues of moral imagination: “a uniquely human ability to conceive of fellow humanity as moral beings and as persons, not as objects whose value rests in utility or usefulness.” This is a profound challenge: to conceive of other humans as persons, not as objects useful or unuseful to us. Neighbor implies valuable personhood, not just asset or liability. To be fully human, Jones posits, is, “to embrace the duties and obligations toward a purpose of security and endurance for, first and foremost, the family and the local community.”

This personhood is woven in the most essential fabric of human existence, the family. To deny family is to deny personhood. To deny personhood is to relegate people to existence as asset or liability in a ledger. But to deny recognition of personhood to another is also to undermine our own humanity, because, as Jones asserts, moral imagination is a uniquely human ability.

Jesus was a Messiah who saw families: frantic parents like Jairus asked him to heal their children; young kids offered their fish Happy Meals to him, which he happily multiplied and fed the masses with. When the disciples tried to remind parents how important Jesus was, he stopped them, and said, “let the little kids come over.” To stuffy adults, he sternly reminded them that to enter the Kingdom of God, one had to become like a child.

Jesus constantly reframed the questions his followers threw at him. He challenged the edges of their imagination, coaxing them to a place of empathy. Imagine this, he’d say: your neighbor is the Samaritan you fear who saves you from robbers on a barren road and pays for your recovery; maybe the person you distrust will be the means of your survival. Maybe the dynamic between you will be turned upside-down and you’ll end up receiving, not just sacrificing and giving.

Today, what do we as Christians believe about who God is?

We see that God cares about moms and children who have had an unfair life and are left out in the cold without resources.

We see that God allowed a savvy, compassionate woman and a completely vulnerable infant to encounter each other in a river in ancient Egypt, restoring the baby to his worried mama and preparing him for leadership later.

We see that God intersected David’s life in such a way that David knew and trusted God’s kindness and wanted to show God’s kindness to the devastated survivors of warfare, a family ripped apart at the seams.

We see that Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, valued the personhood of sons and daughters, moms and dads, and saw their lives as valuable and worth intervention.

We see that Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, constantly pivoted questions away from the concerns of the asker and toward the concerns of those being asked about. Jesus Christ celebrated the humanity, the personhood, of those who were deemed a liability.

In continuity with God-who-heard-a-child-crying-under-a-bush, in continuity with God-who-made-his-way-to-the-dying-daughter-of-Jairus, today, we affirm that families matter to God; that children have personhood and value, and that to willfully separate parents from their children and children from their parents is to deface our own “uniquely human ability to conceive of fellow humanity as moral beings and as persons, not as objects whose value rests in utility or usefulness.”

We affirm the beauty of parenthood, the value of childhood, and the imperative to honor both. We appreciate the parenthood of Mary and Joseph, the childhood of the toddler Jesus, and the care Jesus extended to his mother while he was dying by crucifixion.

We grieve violence, food shortage, corruption of leaders, and lack of infrastructure that places families in the impossible scenario of weighing whether their children will be safer in their home towns or migrating to a new place. We agree with Jesus that it would be better to have a millstone around the neck and to be thrown into the sea than to deliberately hurt and harm a child.

We pray that a robust vision of the value of human life will prevail over short-term practices that separate kids from their dads and moms. We pray that a holistic value of human life will stretch from dangerous school hallways to full social services for impoverished pregnant women, from holistic crisis pregnancy centers to bleak nursing home hallways, from law enforcement encounters with people of color to immigrant detention centers.

We reject notions that ease us into giving up our moral imaginations, like the necessity of evil “for the greater good,” the necessity of social “collateral damage,” the necessity of inflicting damage on others’ families in order to prevent potential future harm on our own.

We condemn the use of human lives as pawns in political maneuvering when done by any portion of the political spectrum. We celebrate expressions of immigration policy that maintain the dignity and God-given value of every individual human life.

We know that the government of the United States is separate from any one religious body. But we pray that current and future government officials and representatives will recall the ethical principles at work in many world religions and that often guide our common life together in the public square of our democratic republic. Our grand experiment in the United States cannot succeed without a robust appreciation of individual personhood existing in the fabric of family.

And so, we stand, sit, and kneel with those who are crying for their children and their parents; we pray for peace, stability, and opportunity in their home countries; and we pray for wisdom for the leaders who have the power and the moment to create humane policies, if they will only have the imagination to do so.

 

Matt Douglass ~ Baptism and the Missing Mind: My Baby

Philosopher of religion Dr. Matt Douglass and his wife, physics professor Dr. Angela Douglass recently had their second child. Shortly after their gender-confirming ultrasound they discovered their new baby was at high risk in the womb and, if surviving to birth, would be born with severe brain deformation, likely resulting from a very rare disease, Walker-Warburg Syndrome. The Douglasses learned that, “she may have some awareness, possibly emotions and pain and sensations. However, language development and abstract thought seem unlikely.” They decided to name their little girl Joy.

Joy was born in May. She experiences seizures but she is stable. Her cognitive disability means that it is likely she is unable to recognize pain. Joy’s life expectancy is two to three years. Dr. Matt Douglass wrote his PhD dissertation on theodicy – the problem of suffering.

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We were worried that Joy would never be able to travel long distances, but after assurances from the doctors, we drove to Kansas for a week, which started with a wedding, ended with a baptism, and had some good and bad times in between.

Our oldest daughter Amelia was dedicated at our church in Arkadelphia.  We had considered whether to baptize her, but ultimately we decided not to. I know the basic arguments from the various traditions, but I still don’t have a settled opinion on the issue. The Nazarenes will dedicate or baptize infants, depending on the family’s wishes, but the Nazarene culture seems to have a preference for believer’s baptism.  But that’s not an option for Joy.

We could have dedicated Joy, as we dedicated Amelia two years ago, but the idea seemed…not pointless, exactly, but anemic.  Typically at a dedication the parents promise to raise the child in the church so that, eventually, she can adopt the faith for herself.  The church, in turn, promises to show love to the child and help incorporate her into the body of Christ.

But such things apply to Joy, if at all, in a far diminished way.

I sing the Lord’s Prayer to her, but she’ll never learn to pray.  We’ll bring her to church, but she’ll never learn the basics of the faith.  We’ll take care of her physically, but to what extent can we really meet her spiritual needs?

Baptism symbolizes the new creation that comes with salvation.  It also represents our eventual death, burial, and bodily resurrection.  More than this, though, we (Angela and I) believe that baptism is a sacrament, a true means of grace, not merely a symbolic ritual.

And, this side of heaven, it is the only sacrament Joy can participate in.  (I suppose there won’t be any baptisms or marriages in heaven, but perhaps communion?  I hope so.)

Fortunately, my dad got his district license from the Church of the Nazarene in July, which gave him the proper authority to baptize Joy for us.  Our church manual includes a ritual for the baptism of infants, which my dad amended for the occasion.  Here is part of it:

[To the congregation]:

Dearly Beloved: The sacrament of baptism is the sign and seal of the new covenant of grace.

While we do not hold that baptism imparts the regenerating grace of God, we do believe that Christian baptism signifies for this young child God’s acceptance within the community of Christian faith on the basis of prevenient grace.

At this time we are unsure to what extent Joy will be able to have a personal knowledge of faith in Jesus Christ. We are convinced though that she is able to sense and absorb the Christ like love that surrounds her.

[To the parents]:

In presenting this child for baptism you are hereby witnessing to your own personal Christian faith and to your purpose to continue to extend to her Christ like love and affection. To this end it is your duty to take her as often as feasible to the sanctuary where she may sense the presence of God and of godly fellowship. To share with her often the assurance of God’s love for her and as much as in you lies, to bring her up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

Will you endeavor to do so by the help of God? If so, answer, “I will.”

[To Joy]:

Joy Ana Douglass, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

It was a solemn and emotional occasion.

 

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Follow the Douglass family at https://thedouglasses.wordpress.com/ 

Jerry Walls ~ Wheaton, Allah, & the Trinity: Do Muslims Really Worship the Same God as C.S. Lewis?

There was an exquisitely beautiful house in the woods.   It had obviously been built hundreds of years ago, but its exact origin was controversial.  The identity of the builder was in dispute, and some said no one really knew, and a few even denied the house had a builder.   Two men were discussing the matter, and they happened to agree that a man named Mr Devine was indeed the builder, and they were both admirers of him and his work.   As they continued their conversation, one of them commented that Devine was from Edinburgh, but the other insisted that he had come from Heidelberg.   “No, I assure you, Mr Devine and his family moved here from Edinburgh in 1787, and they built the house that year.”   The other replied: “Family? What family?  Mr Devine was a lifelong bachelor, and he moved here from Heidelberg in 1792, and that is when the house was built.”  “Well,” the first man replied, “while Mr Devine indeed designed the house, his two sons played vital roles alongside him in crafting and constructing it.”

There is an ongoing controversy involving Wheaton College and its decision first to suspend, and then to proceed with plans to terminate Larycia Hawkins, a tenured political science professor, for her statement that Christians and Muslims worship the same God.  For many observers, her statement is obviously true, while for others it is just as obviously false and no Christian teacher should even think it, let alone declare it in public.  Both within the secular media, as well as the Christian community, still others see the debate as a matter of quibbling over words that betrays Wheaton’s true legacy, or that reflects excessive rigidity.

This controversy continues to generate confusion and misunderstanding largely because putting the question in terms of whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God conflates a number of questions that need to be kept clearly distinct.  While some of these have a straightforward answer, others do not.  Here are four of the questions that must be distinguished to avoid perpetuating confusion:  1) Do Christians and Muslims believe essentially the same thing about God? 2) If they do not, are these differences of belief about God necessarily reflected in essentially different forms and expressions of worship?  3) Can persons who subscribe to other religions besides Christianity be in a saving relationship with God?  4) Can persons who knowingly and persistently reject Christ be saved?

The answer to the first question is clear, for obvious reasons.  There is only one God, and he cannot possibly have logically incompatible properties or attributes.  While Christians and Muslims share some beliefs about God, such as the belief that he created our world and revealed himself to Abraham, they also have several beliefs that are simply irreconcilable with each other.  Claims that are logically contradictory in this fashion cannot both be true of God.   The hard rock of logical impossibility shatters any claim that the essential beliefs of both Christians and Muslims can be true.  Consider these examples.

Either Jesus died on the cross to save us from our sins, or he did not.

Either Jesus was raised bodily from the dead, or he was not.

Either Jesus is the Son of God, or He is not.

Either Jesus is God’s final definitive revelation, or He is not.

Either God exists eternally in Three Persons, or He does not.

Christians affirm the first of each of these logically incompatible claims, and Muslims affirm the second.  But more importantly, each of these claims is absolutely essential to Christian belief and theology.   It is disrespectful to both Christians and Muslims to downplay or trivialize these differences. The hard reality that must be faced is that either Christians or Muslims are deeply mistaken in some of their essential beliefs about who God is and the way of salvation.

To put this in terms of our parable, while there is nominal agreement that the house had a builder, and that his name was Devine, that is hardly sufficient to support the claim that the men in our conversation agree in any substantive sense, even about who built the house.

This brings us to the second question, which also has a fairly straightforward answer.  These differing truth claims about God do in fact lead to profoundly different forms and expressions of worship.  Muslims engage in certain patterns of required prayer that are not required of Christians for instance.  And obviously, many aspects and components of Christian worship cannot be shared by Muslims without denying their own theology.

Differences in theology pervade our worship, and it is difficult to find common ground for shared worship.   Consider for instance theses lines from a classic hymn.  At first glance, it might be thought that Muslims could perhaps sing the first three lines of this classic hymn, even if they obviously could not sing the fourth:

Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God Almighty

Early in the morning our song shall rise to Thee.

Holy, Holy, Holy merciful and mighty

God in Three Persons, blessed Trinity.

Does the fact that Muslims might sing the first three lines suggest any sort of agreement with Christians in worship?  It is doubtful since for Christians, the One referred to and worshiped in the first three lines is precisely the “blessed Trinity.”   The Trinity is always the referent when Christians sing about the “Lord God Almighty.”

Moreover, the heart of Christian worship flows out of gratitude for the love and grace of God as expressed in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  Again, consider these lines from another classic hymn.

Were the whole realm of nature mine,

That were an offering far too small;

Love so amazing, so divine,

Demands my soul, my life, my all.

Christian worship, whether expressed in the sacrament of Holy Communion, or in classic hymnody, is premised on gratitude for an act of sacrificial love that Muslims reject by virtue of denying not only the incarnation, but even that Jesus died on the cross.  These distinctively Christian beliefs not only inspire Christian worship and devotion, but also define its content.

The third question, however, is more complicated.  While not all Christians agree, noted thinkers ranging from some of the Church Fathers, to John Wesley, to CS Lewis have contended that the answer is yes.  Consider, for instance, this passage from John Wesley in which he discusses various forms of faith, ranging from materialism and deism to fully formed Christian faith.    Speaking particularly of Muslims, he wrote:

I cannot but prefer this before the faith of the deists; because, though it embraces nearly the same objects, yet they are rather to be pitied than blamed for the narrowness of their faith.  And their not believing the whole truth is not owing to their want of sincerity, but merely to their want of light….It cannot be doubted that this plea will avail for millions of modern ‘heathens.’  Inasmuch as little is given to them, little will be required. (“On Faith”)

In another sermon, he wrote similarly about those who have not heard the gospel and their prospects for salvation.

…we are not required to determine anything touching their final state.  How it will please God, the Judge of all, to deal with them, we may leave to God himself.  But this we know, that he is not the God of the Christians only, but the God of the heathens also; that he is ‘rich in mercy to all who call upon him’[Rom 10:12], ‘according to the light they have’; and that ‘in every nation he that feareth God and worketh righteousness is accepted of him.’ [Acts 10:35](“On Charity”)

This is the line of thinking that also appears in the famous scene near the end of C. S. Lewis’s book The Last Battle, where Emeth, the worshiper of Tash, is accepted by Aslan.  Unknowingly he was actually serving Aslan because his worship was motivated by a love for truth and righteousness.  The point is that Christ died for all persons, whether they know it or not, and the Holy Spirit is working to draw them to Christ, whether they know it or not, and they may be responding truly to the “light” they have and consequently be on the way to final salvation.

We come now to the fourth question, which is at the heart of each of these questions.  The answer to this question is straightforward for orthodox Christians, and the reason is clear.  If God is a Trinity, and Jesus is the Second Person of the Trinity, and salvation is a right relationship with God, then salvation requires accepting Christ and confessing Him as Lord.  Just as it is true that to persistently reject Christ is to reject the only God that exists,  so it is true that to know him is to know the one true God.  Jesus insists that because He and the Father are one that knowledge of God is inseparable from knowing Him, and that to know Him is to know His Father.  “If God were your Father, you would love me,” Jesus says (John 8:42).   This Trinitarian logic runs especially through the Gospel and Epistles of John.  Notice: this implies it is possible to know God before knowing Christ explicitly, but it also means that anyone who truly knows and loves the Father will also love Jesus when they are truly introduced to Him.  Emeth was serving Aslan before he was aware of it, but his final salvation involved an explicit encounter with Aslan and knowledge of who He was.

But this is where our knowledge stops because we are in no place to judge how clearly the “light” of Christ has come to adherents of other religions who know little or nothing of the gospel.  Even those we may think have heard of Christ quite clearly may not have done so because of various factors that may prevent them from fairly or accurately hearing the gospel.  Only God knows who has truly heard and seen, and how they have responded.

So where does this leave us?  With respect to the original controversial claim, there is no unequivocal sense in which it is true that Muslims and Christians worship the same God.  To avoid this equivocation, it is crucial not to confuse the first two questions with the latter two.

The first two questions pertain to objective public truth about what Christianity and Islam teach about God, and the inescapable fact that both the beliefs and the worship practices of these religions are mutually incompatible; therefore, both of them cannot be true.  The third question pertains not to straightforward facts about Islam and Christianity, but to individual Muslims (as well as adherents of other religions) and their relationship to God.  Here we are poorly positioned to judge.  We may hope and even have reason to believe that many of them are worshiping God faithfully according to the light they have, as Wesley would put it.  The fourth question pertains to a central, non-negotiable claim of Christianity.  While we can be clear about that claim and what it entails, only judgment day will definitively show who has knowingly and persistently rejected Christ.

In the meantime, let us muster as much clarity as we can while engaging these issues, even as we pray for charity on all sides, starting with ourselves.   However, we should not confuse grace and love for all persons with Christian fellowship, nor should we assume or state that those who do not profess Christ as Lord are our brothers and sisters in a common faith.  That fails to advance genuine respect and understanding just as it does when we presume to know the hearts of others or their eternal destiny.

 

Reprinted with permission from www.christianthought.hbu.edu.

Jerry Walls ~ Conversation: Free Will in Brazil

Note from the Editor: Wesleyan Accent is pleased to share this recent interview with Dr. Jerry L. Walls.

Wesleyan Accent: Recently you traveled to South America to speak at an Arminian conference. Maybe my view of Brazil is largely formed by its tourism outreach, but is Jacobus Arminius popular in Rio?

Jerry Walls: Yes, I was invited by the publisher (Editora Reflexão) of the Portuguese translation of the book I co-authored with Joe Dongell, Why I Am Not a Calvinist, to do a speaking tour in Brazil this past August. I spoke nine times in eight days in five cities: Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Cuiaba, Natal and Recife. The week ended with Conference on Arminian Theology, for which I was the speaker. It was the first of what the organizers hope will be an annual event.

And indeed, Arminius has a growing fan club in Brazil, as I discovered a few years ago. There is a Facebook discussion group in Brazil named “Arminianismo” that has over 7,300 members. The Arminian community there is quite well informed as well as vigorous and energetic.

WA: What was your sense of the dynamics that came together to make a conference on Arminius a “go” for Christians in Brazil? One’s perspective of Brazil may be that it’s largely Catholic.

JW: Well, certainly Brazil is traditionally a Roman Catholic country, but that is rapidly changing. Estimates vary, but Brazil is now roughly 25% or more Protestant, the large majority of which are Pentecostals of some variety, especially Assemblies of God. Some 65% are still Roman Catholic, but the large majority of those are nominal. So in reality, among Brazilians who take their faith seriously, there are probably more evangelical Protestants than Roman Catholics.

Pentecostalism, of course, grew out of the Wesleyan and Holiness movements, so Pentecostal theology is naturally Wesleyan/Arminian in terms of its instincts. However, Calvinists have been active in publishing books in Portuguese, so they appear to be making inroads into Brazilian Pentecostalism. One of the places I spoke was an Assemblies of God seminary, and the bookstore there had more serious books by Calvinists than Arminians.

The good news is that the Arminian community in just the past few years has been working hard to get more serious Arminian works translated into Portuguese. Editora Reflexao, particularly with the encouragement of Wellington Mariano, who was one of the translators of our book, has led the way in publishing serious Arminian books. While I was there, they released the Portuguese translation of the biography of Arminius by Carl Bangs. The Works of Arminius were also released while I was there by another publisher.

So in short, I got involved when they published Why I Am Not a Calvinist, and a number of persons in Brazil also discovered my various YouTube videos critiquing Calvinism. Once that happened I started getting a lot of “friend” requests on Facebook from Brazilians! So all those factors led to my being invited to speak in Brazil.

WA: How do you describe the theological climate in Brazil in terms of interest in the intersection of theology and philosophy of religion?

JW: That is hard to say, but one of the places I lectured was at one of the biggest Christian bookstores in Brazil, and a number of people at that event were talking to me about apologetic and philosophical issues. It is also worth noting that Richard Swinburne, the great Oxford philosopher of religion, recently did a speaking tour at a number of Brazilian universities. So there is certainly interest in philosophy and apologetics.

WA: For you as a Methodist, when you travel globally, what do you note about the crossover of the appeal of the notion of free will and the appeal of Wesleyan theology?

JW: I think the deepest appeal of Wesleyan theology is that is heartily affirms a God who is truly good and sincerely loves all persons. God does not determine, he empowers, he enables, encourages. And the message that God loves us and wants to empower us to love him back, as well as each other is a message of great hope. No one has been “passed over” or determined by God for eternal misery and damnation. To the contrary, there is hope for everyone, and the resources of grace are available to transform even those persons who may seem most hopeless in our eyes.

WA: Has the cross-cultural appeal of Why I Am Not a Calvinist authored by you and Dr. Joe Dongell surprised you? Why do you think it has garnered sustained interest? 

JW: Well, the Calvinism issue is not going away anytime soon. As relatively young movements like those in Brazil grow, they will need to define their theological convictions more clearly and explicitly. And as I noted above, Calvinists are attempting to persuade Pentecostals that Calvinism is the theology they should adopt. I was surprised recently, by the way, to see a Barna study that indicated that 31% of Pentecostal pastors in the United States identified themselves as “Reformed” compared to only 27% who self-identified as Wesleyan/Arminian. I doubt that all those 31% are full-blooded Calvinists, but it is still telling that so many own the Reformed label.

WA: What most surprised you about your visit in Brazil?

JW: I would have to say seeing the large number of Calvinist books in the two large bookstores I visited.

WA: Why do you think the Wesleyan-Arminian distinctive is still so potent and flourishing worldwide?

 JW: In addition to what I said above, Wesleyan/Arminian Christianity is flourishing in the form of Pentecostalism. Pentecostal theology represents the dynamism of the earlier Wesleyan and Holiness movements, particularly with its emphasis on the reality of a God who is actively present in our lives, empowering us, leading us, speaking to us, comforting us, healing us and so on.

Certainly life is difficult for many people in places around the world where Pentecostal Christianity is rapidly growing. It is the dynamic reality of a God who cares about us and is actively present with us that provides power for living hopefully regardless of difficult circumstances. Wesleyan Christianity needs to re-capture, or better, be re-captured by that sort of dynamism.