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  • Never a Dull Moment in the Middle East

    The present flap in Lebanon is one more example of this:

    The crises was sparked last week in Beirut when the government of Prime Minister Fouad al-Siniora ordered the communication and surveillance network at Runway 17 of Beirut Airport be dismantled, claiming it was "illegal and unconstitutional"…

    Hezbollah cried foul, claiming the network had been in place for years, adding that dismantling it was a red line because otherwise Beirut Airport would be "transformed into a base for the the CIA, the FBI and Mossad, referring to American and Israeli intelligence.  Hezbollah secretary general Hasan Nasrallah spoke just hours after the crisis started, saying the communication system and Shuqyar were "red lines" that could not be crossed. He reminded his audience that when Siniora became prime minister in 2005, one of the main points of his political program was "supporting the resistance" and giving it (Hezbollah) a free hand to wage its "war of liberation" against Israel in any way it saw fit.

    And Hezbollah showed it had the "right stuff" to back itself up too, blowing away the government, the Sunnis and the Druze in one shot.

    That illustrates the central problem in the West’s approach to "peace in the Middle East:" whom do you negotiate with?  The Israelis are in the same boat with Fatah vs. Hamas, while the U.S. tries to sort out an even bigger mess in Iraq with the Kurds, Sunnis, Shi’ites, the various factions in each and the foreign powers (Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Syria, etc.)  In the region which invented power holder/power challenger/careerist politics, it’s sometimes hard to know where to start a "peace process," let alone finish one.

    The Arabs and others in the Middle East are going to have to decide for themselves that they want stable, transparent government before we can even consider rationally negotiating with anyone.  Until then, we’re best off letting them fight amongst themselves and exerting enough damage control to minimise the effects of the chaos.

    As far as Lebanon is concerned, my guess is that the Saudis, having been shamed by Hezbollah’s success, will do what they have to do to restore their honour.  It won’t be pretty either.

  • The Church: Going Back to What?

    Jonathan Stone explores the issue of "Primal Church:"

    When I speak of primal church I am not speaking of some sort of neanderthal church, but rather those primitive elements that still serve as the basic building blocks of the church. For example, geometrically speaking, we can think of the primitive shapes such as cones, spheres, pyramids, cubes, etc., by which all other shapes and designs might be constructed. Or we might think of the primary colors, from which the whole gamut of colors might be constructed. Or we might think of how bits and bytes are the fundamental building blocks of all computer programming languages. I’m sure the list could go on.

    A large part of the problem is this: what constutites the "early church?"  That, in part, is the issue that Cardinal Kaspar stepped on in his comments about Anglicanism having to choose between the "the churches of the first millennium -Catholic and Orthodox" and the "the Protestant churches of the 16th century."  Judging by the slugfest that ensued on Titusonenine, that’s still a controversial question.

    I’m going to try to tackle this question on multiple levels.

    Let’s start with the typical "Protestant" view of church history.  We start with the "Apostolic Church," the church that existed when those who put on paper or parchment the New Testment were still on the earth.  Then there’s this gap full of apostasy until the Reformation, after which time we have true religion(s) restored (those infamous variations of the Protestant churches that  Bossuet catalogued!)  until the present time.

    Evangelicals of all types have variations on this.  Wesleyans and Pentecostals, for example, like to start the clock of "restoration" with Wesley, with the result that we have a "Wesleyan-Pentecostal trajectory" of history.  Telling someone like me that helped design missles in my career that our history has a "trajectory" only conjures images of something that’s eventually going to explode when it gets in proximity to its target, not the most felicitous view of history.

    Such "gappy" views of history only cultivate exceptionalism, something that has been a stumbling block to the unity of the Body of Christ for a long time.  They’re also ahistorical, which means that, since we refuse to learn the mistakes of others, we’re sure to make the same ones ourselves.

    Flipping things around, Cardinal Kaspar’s glib characterisation of Catholicism as closer to the church that was in the beginning papers over an enormous number of issues of Catholic and Orthodox history.  To start with, once the dust had settled on the Reformation, what you had was two stark choices: a 16th century Protestant and Reformed construct, or a 16th century Catholic Countereformation construct.  Anglicanism was something of a DMZ between the two, and didn’t stay demilitarised very long either.  (That, BTW, is the real meaning of the "via media," not the mushy liberalism we have today in the TEC.)  Moreover Anglicanism represented the first broad-based attempt to peel away some of the unBiblical accretions and get back to a "Patristic" church of the Roman Empire era.  In the last century, the Catholics themselves realised that much of what they did and practiced were late accretions, which led to the following:

    The second (trend before Vatican II) was a trend back towards a stronger Biblical/Patristic emphasis. The Biblical trend was exemplified by the École Biblique de Jerusalem, headed up by Roland de Vaux. It was given a serious boost by the 1943 encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, which encouraged Bilbical studies and allowed Catholic Biblical translations to be done from the original Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew rather than strictly the Latin. The Patristic emphasis was the work of scholars such as Jean Danielou and Henri de Lubac.

    So where does this leave Pentecostals?  We started in the last century with a "clean slate," but it was quickly filled up by contact with other Evangelicals and their ahistorical approach.  The result was a simple, straightforward church structure that proved simple to implement and propagate, but left us flatfooted theologically in many respects.  Now we are wrestling with many issues that, IMHO, we would find simpler to solve if we had a better handle on where Christianity has been.

    To start with, we need to take more regard for what came in the centuries immediately after the New Testament.  They weren’t perfect, they didn’t always get it right, but they wrestled with many issues in a culture not only closer to the NT’s but also a pagan culture that we’re seeing a comback of in our own time.  The "Patristic" era would be a good study on how these people dealt with many issues that we’re trying to sort out today.  One important note: although the manifestations of the Pentecostal gifts declined during this era, the belief that God should be an active help in our lives didn’t.  I’m specifically thinking about the miraculous, something the Reformers jettisoned and Protestant Christianity has struggled to come back to.

    Second, we need to be honest with ourselves and admit that we’re going to have structure of some kind.  The Evangelical/Pentecostal romantic dream of a Christianity "without form and void" only obscures the real problems we face.  For example, the back and forth over the election of state/regional Administrative Bishops in the Church of God at MissionalCOG would be well informed by the practice of the Roman Empire church (which is why I brought up the issue and my reference to Ambrose’s election to start with.)  What we need is a structure that serves the needs of God’s work and God’s people, not the other way around.

    Third–and this is the real "trout in the milk" for Evangelicals and Pentecostals–we need to realistically face the fact that Christianity went to liturgical forms of worship a lot more quickly and easily than we care to admit.  Our worship is generally structured (and in many cases contrived) even without liturgical structure.   Same kind of structure was part and parcel with Judaism and it’s unreasonable to think that Christianity would be completely free of it.  Again we need to find forms of worship that really bring us closer to God, irrespective of what form or lack of it they take.

    History is a big deal.  It’s time to face it realistically if we want some help from those who went before in our journey into where we’re going.

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  • Israel: the Happiest Nation on Earth?

    Back in the 1960’s, the Armenian-American Demos Sharkarian wrote The Happiest People on Earth, about the Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship International and full-Gospel Christians in general.

    Now Spengler–who I feature frequently–tells us that Israel, celebrating its 60th anniversary, is in fact the happiest nation on earth:

    In a world given over to morbidity, the state of Israel still teaches the world love of life, not in the trivial sense of joie de vivre, but rather as a solemn celebration of life. In another location, I argued, “It’s easy for the Jews to talk about delighting in life. They are quite sure that they are eternal, while other peoples tremble at the prospect impending extinction. It is not their individual lives that the Jews find so pleasant, but rather the notion of a covenantal life that proceeds uninterrupted through the generations.” Still, it is remarkable to observe by what wide a margin the Israelis win the global happiness sweepstakes.

    I think that a large part of this is that Jews do not regard the absurdities of life as insults to the Divine omnipotence.  Christians, and Evangelicals in particular, with a heavy hangover from Reformed fatalism, spend way too much time worrying about the “justice” of God.  “Open theology” isn’t necessary to solve this problem.  If there’s one priceless legacy I take from growing up with Jewish people (Spengler’s statements about American Jews notwithstanding,) it’s that, just because things don’t work out according to what we think they should, or what we thought was “God’s will” for our life, God’s still there.  Put another way, life can be supremely idiotic, but God is still in charge!

    On the other hand, we have the Muslims:

    I argued in another location. Islam, or “submission”, does not understand faith – trust in a loving God even when His actions appear incomprehensible – in the manner of Jews and Christians. Because the whim of Allah controls every event from the orbit of each electron to the outcome of battles, Muslims know only success or failure at each moment in time.

    Christians these days are enamoured with just about everything Jewish.  Perhaps they really need to start here, stop the hand-wringing and start living.

  • Preface for Whitsunday (Pentecost)

    From the 1662 Book of Common Prayer:

    …according to whose most true promise, the Holy Ghost came down as at this time from heaven with a sudden great sound, as it had been a mighty wind in the likeness of fiery tongues, lighting upon the Apostles, to teach them, and to lead them to all truth; giving them both the gift of divers languages, and also boldness with fervent zeal constantly to preach the Gospel unto all nations; whereby we have been brought out of darkness and error into the clear light and true knowledge of thee, and of thy Son Jesus Christ.

    It’s interesting to note that in the traditional Anglican prayer books (and especially the 1662 one) we see a God portrayed as a) one who make promises, b) one who keeps them, and c) one who moves in power (or is asked to move in power.)  We also see this contrast from more modern concepts in the whole business of Holy Baptism and the "Contract on the Episcopalians."

    One cannot fail to note in this preface the allusion to Acts 1:8.

    A central purpose of modern Pentecost is to restore the reality of a God who moves in a living, powerful way.  That wasn’t withdrawn by God after the Apostles (as the dispensationalists would have us believe) or forgotten by the church (as the ahistoricists would have us think.)  It’s a thread that runs through Christianity of all kinds, and runs from the first Pentecost all the way through to the present time.

  • Sun Tzu’s Method of Teaching a Lesson

    Travis Johnson gives his congregation a lesson from the great Chinese author Sun Tzu:

    Sometimes you just have to break things and burn things down to get people where they need to go.

    Have you ever had someone tell you that you shouldn’t burn bridges?  Me too.  It is good advice…sometimes.  In the case of mission, sometimes you just have to grow a backbone and leave yourself with no exit plan.  When you’re backed into a corner, you have to fight because there is only one way out.

    What he may not be aware of, however, is Sun Tzu’s own method of teaching, which is grandly illustrated in the "introduction" to The Art of War, quoted below.  (Note: Sun Tzu knew that women were made of sterner stuff than was commonly acknowledged then.  We know better now, especially in the Church of God, as I illustrate here.)

    Sun Tzu Wu was a native of the Ch`i State. His ART OF WAR brought him to the notice of Ho Lu, [2] King of Wu. Ho Lu said to him: "I have carefully perused your 13 chapters. May I submit your theory of managing soldiers to a slight test?"

    Sun Tzu replied: "You may."

    Ho Lu asked: "May the test be applied to women?"

    The answer was again in the affirmative, so arrangements were made to bring 180 ladies out of the Palace. Sun Tzu divided them into two companies, and placed one of the King’s favorite concubines at the head of each. He then bade them all take spears in their hands, and addressed them thus: "I presume you know the difference between front and back, right hand and left hand?"

    The girls replied: Yes.

    Sun Tzu went on: "When I say "Eyes front," you must look straight ahead. When I say "Left turn," you must face towards your left hand. When I say "Right turn," you must face towards your right hand. When I say "About turn," you must face right round towards your back."

    Again the girls assented. The words of command having been thus explained, he set up the halberds and battle-axes in order to begin the drill. Then, to the sound of drums, he gave the order "Right turn." But the girls only burst out laughing. Sun Tzu said: "If words of command are not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly understood, then the general is to blame."

    So he started drilling them again, and this time gave the order "Left turn," whereupon the girls once more burst into fits of laughter. Sun Tzu: "If words of command are not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly understood, the general is to blame. But if his orders ARE clear, and the soldiers nevertheless disobey, then it is the fault of their officers."

    So saying, he ordered the leaders of the two companies to be beheaded. Now the king of Wu was watching the scene from the top of a raised pavilion; and when he saw that his favorite concubines were about to be executed, he was greatly alarmed and hurriedly sent down the following message: "We are now quite satisfied as to our general’s ability to handle troops. If We are bereft of these two concubines, our meat and drink will lose their savor. It is our wish that they shall not be beheaded."

    Sun Tzu replied: "Having once received His Majesty’s commission to be the general of his forces, there are certain commands of His Majesty which, acting in that capacity, I am unable to accept."

    Accordingly, he had the two leaders beheaded, and straightway installed the pair next in order as leaders in their place. When this had been done, the drum was sounded for the drill once more; and the girls went through all the evolutions, turning to the right or to the left, marching ahead or wheeling back, kneeling or standing, with perfect accuracy and precision, not venturing to utter a sound. Then Sun Tzu sent a messenger to the King saying: "Your soldiers, Sire, are now properly drilled and disciplined, and ready for your majesty’s inspection. They can be put to any use that their sovereign may desire; bid them go through fire and water, and they will not disobey."

    But the King replied: "Let our general cease drilling and return to camp. As for us, We have no wish to come down and inspect the troops."

    Thereupon Sun Tzu said: "The King is only fond of words, and cannot translate them into deeds."

    After that, Ho Lu saw that Sun Tzu was one who knew how to handle an army, and finally appointed him general. In the west, he defeated the Ch`u State and forced his way into Ying, the capital; to the north he put fear into the States of Ch`i and Chin, and spread his fame abroad amongst the feudal princes. And Sun Tzu shared in the might of the King.

  • Code Pink Uses Witchcraft to Protest Iraq War

    The secularists have done their best to decouple "God and Country" but obviously the anti-war group Code Pink knows better:

    Code Pink is now resorting to witchcraft to beef up the number of its supporters protesting Berkeley’s controversial Marine Corps Recruiting Center.

    The women’s anti-war group has told ralliers to come equipped with spells and pointy hats Friday for "Witches, clowns and sirens day," the last of the group’s weeklong homage to Mother’s Day.

    "Women are coming to cast spells and do rituals and to impart wisdom to figure out how we’re going to end war," Zanne Sam Joi of Bay Area Code Pink told FOXNews.com.

    Wonder what the U.S. military’s Wiccan chaplains think of this?  Hmmm…

  • The Chickens Come Home to Roost over Identity Politics

    It wasn’t supposed to happen this way:

     On Tuesday night, we mentioned the dustup between two Democratic pundits, Ms. Brazile and Mr. Begala, who engaged in a prime-time debate about the coalitions being built by Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Begala, a Clinton supporter, said the party could not win in November with just “eggheads and African-Americans,” that the party could not ignore white middle-class voters. Ms. Brazile, who said she was not “undecided but undeclared” when it came to her choice for a candidate, shot back that Mr. Begala’s notions were dividing the party. (And that she’d chugged down many a beer with Joe and Jane “six-pack” in an effort to woo white voters.)

    But it did.

    Identity politics have been a characteristic of the left for a long time.  The idea was equality of outcome but the result is division.  As along as the division ran along left-right fault lines, it worked to the left’s advantage, but right at the moment that’s not the way things are going.

    And don’t forget, the Hispanics haven’t weighed in yet, either.

    If the Republicans in general and McCain in particular can ever figure out how to make the most of this self-inflicted problem, the Democrats will have a disaster on their hands.  The answer to that question will decide this election.

  • “Evangelicals are Being Shunned”

    The new Lord Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, is spot on with this one:

    In an interview with ReligiousIntelligence.com, he said that the good work done by many Christian and evangelical groups is often just ignored and derided. “I think there is a culture now in our society where if something is even vaguely Christian, if there is a whiff of evangelical fervour about it then it’s almost somehow verboten to fund it,” he told the paper at a hustings event in the lead-up to the election.

    He continued: “I think that’s quite wrong because if you look at the good that these groups do and you look at the way we’re going to transform society and undo the breakdown that we’ve seen in family life, the growing-up of kids without boundaries and all the rest of the things we’ve been talking about in this campaign, the Christian groups are essential.”

    The reason for this is primarily rooted in politics.

    Ever wonder why liberals, when they whine about Evangelical preachers, always bring up Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson?  It’s simple: these two, more than others, awoke the "Religious Right" in the 1980’s and facilitated the triumph of the Reagan Revolution.  Ever since then the left, here and abroad, has propagated an inchoate fear of Evangelicals, reflecting their own terror of being dethroned by movement so populistic and alien to everything they stand for and, as an elite, live for.  I personally think they’d rather have shar’ia; the deeply political nature of Islam is something they don’t like, but understand.

    This is amazing considering that, IMHO, Evangelicals have a notoriously weak game plan to actually finish the job and take over society, in the West at least.  But then there’s the Third World…and if you think that Western Evangelicals inspire terror, the thought of their Third World counterparts getting the victory and redistributing the world’s inequitable distribution of wealth really has some reaching for the brown pants.  But only those who can see past their own racial paradigm are focused on this, and that hasn’t quite reached critical mass just yet.

    The back side of Johnson’s comments–to fund Evangelical projects–has certainly had a lot of play on this side of the Atlantic, but there’s a danger there too–that the state will seek to redefine the people’s religion in the course of underwriting it.

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  • Protestant or Catholic: Choose Ye This Day, Anglicans

    The Vatican is trying to force Anglicans’ hand on the subject of which way they need to go:

    The Vatican has said that the time has come for the Anglican Church to choose between Protestantism and the ancient churches of Rome and Orthodoxy.

    Speaking on the day that the Archbishop of Canterbury met Benedict XVI in Rome, Cardinal Walter Kasper, the president of the Pontifical Council of Christian Unity, said it was time for Anglicanism to "clarify its identity".

    He told the Catholic Herald: "Ultimately, it is a question of the identity of the Anglican Church. Where does it belong?

    "Does it belong more to the churches of the first millennium -Catholic and Orthodox – or does it belong more to the Protestant churches of the 16th century? At the moment it is somewhere in between, but it must clarify its identity now and that will not be possible without certain difficult decisions."

    It’s been "put on the back burner" because of the more pressing controversies over homosexual prelates and clergy, but the Evangelical vs. Anglo-Catholic divide is right up there as one of those "contradictions" that Anglicans have to deal with on a daily basis.  Anglicanism is in reality a hybrid of both; it can and has gone in both directions over the years, but the emphasis of one or the other is a source of disunity.

    In the case of the Shi’ites from Iran, we see the Vatican attempting to apply pressure at an opponent’s weak point in order to gain advantage.  Cardinal Kasper is doing exactly the same thing with the Anglicans, taking advantage of their current chaotic situation to force Anglicans that just might "swim the Tiber" (like the TAC) to make their move.  It’s something to keep in mind in any current "dialogue" with the Vatican.

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  • When people come forward in his church to accept Jesus as their savior, I don’t say: ‘Do you have papers?’

    Should we?  It’s a good question in Pentecostal churches where Hispanic congregations are growing and voting:

    Gonzalez and other Hispanic pastors across the country seized on the debate to come together as a political force gaining momentum. Hispanic Pentecostals, some experts say, can become an important swing vote in the 2008 elections in key demographic battlegrounds such as Florida, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and North Carolina.

    Gonzalez said he was prompted to act by the hostile tone some religious and political leaders took as they discussed immigration. He believes in securing the borders but is critical of the lack of a national policy that takes into consideration the millions of immigrants that are already here.

    "What do you do with them? Arrest them?" he asked. "When people come forward in his church to accept Jesus as their savior, I don’t say: ‘Do you have papers?’ " he said. "I’ve been called to help people regardless of whether they are here legally."

    The immigration debate soon propelled other pastors from Florida and beyond to become involved. For some, this was a historic departure from a more passive posture. For nearly a century, Hispanic Pentecostals in the U.S. avoided electoral politics. Traditionally conservative on social and family issues such as abortion and homosexuality, Pentecostals broke ranks with other Hispanics and voted Republican in recent elections, according to recent surveys.

    But Gonzalez cautioned that Hispanic Pentecostals are "not a monolithic" group. "We Latino evangelicals have been misread by political parties all along," Gonzalez said. "We are conservative on many values. But we have divided opinions on health care, on the death penalty . . ." In fact, Latino Protestants have shifted in their political allegiance in recent years, said John Green of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, a nonpartisan research group based in Washington. They voted in growing numbers for Republican candidates in 2000 and 2004 but moved back toward the Democrats in the 2006 midterm congressional elections.

    "This is a religious community that moves around politically," Green said.

    I don’t think so.

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