India's Grassroots Revival

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/july/indiagrassroots.html

With its people turning to Christ in waves, India hosts more believers now than at any time in its 4,000-year history.

Tim Stafford

posted 7/08/2011

Shivamma stands in front of her house, braiding her little girl's hair. Her feet are bare, her sari is simple, and she is rail thin, but she speaks to visitors with boldness. She is the face of the new Christianity in India.

Shivamma's home is nestled inside a concrete storm sewer discarded by the factory where she and her husband work. The neighborhood, hidden in an overgrown back lot, consists of huge pipes lined up like mobile homes. Her family of four lives within 84 square feet.

For a Dalit and a woman, Shivamma is doing well. In traditional Hindu thinking, Dalits are not quite human, lacking the right to enter the temple, read, or eat with members of other castes. A person who touches a Dalit must immediately purify himself. (One church planter notes the awful exception: "When it comes to social life, they are untouchable. For rape, they are touchable.")

To be Dalit is much worse than being poor, for no matter how much education or wealth a Dalit accumulates, he or she remains polluted, a shame on the face of the earth. Dalits are like biblical lepers, except that in mainstream Indian culture, they cannot be healed. "Not even God can save them from pollution," the Catholic Dalit advocate A. Maria notes sarcastically.

But although Shivamma comes from generations of people accustomed to bowing and disappearing, she does not cringe any more. She came to the pipe village as a new bride 11 years ago, seeking to escape the jobless poverty of her home village. She and her husband together make $5 a day, more than most Dalits.

For three years she was barren.

Then, a young Dalit Christian named Bangarraju (most Dalits are known by a single name) came to Shivamma's home to pray for her. "I didn't know why he came or to whom he prayed. I thought Jesus was one of the gods." She conceived and gave birth to a son, and later had a second child, a girl. When her daughter was three months old, the girl became severely jaundiced, passing blood. Bangarraju came to them and prayed again, and the daughter was healed.

"I realized that Jesus is the living God," Shivamma told Christianity Today.

"We used to drink and every day we would fight, fight, fight. Jesus Christ brought peace to our family. I have no fear, because I have come to know the living God. I trust him."

An evangelist and church planter, Bangarraju began outreach in the pipe village in 1996. He taught illiterate children in an informal school that met under a tree. He arranged for weekly medical visits through his sponsoring organization, Operation Mobilization. For his first year visiting the village, Bangarraju said nothing about Jesus. It was three years before he baptized a convert. Now a large proportion of the pipe village follows Christ.

Over the years, Bangarraju did more than preach Jesus. He helped Shivamma and her husband learn the discipline of saving. The couple has managed to buy a house in their ancestral village. For the foreseeable future, Shivamma is happy to live in her pipe, rent free.

Yet for her children she dreams of much more: the education neither she nor her husband received. She is determined that they learn English and rise above the pipe village. "We don't want them to suffer as we have."

Opportunities Abound

With a new India rising up, a different kind of Indian Christianity is rising up with it. During a three-week journey across India, I discovered a vibrant, growing Christian community unfolding at the grassroots—a church thoroughly Indian, not Western.

The new-economy India is found in gleaming office towers where techsavvy Indians compete in a global market and climb the corporate ladder. The newly Christian India is found mostly at the bottom rung of society, among men and women like Shivamma, typically poor and illiterate "broken people" (the literal meaning of Dalit). Numbering 140 million or more, Dalits and Tribals (a grouping similar to the Dalits) have begun to shake the foundations of India's social order. They think in ways their ancestors never could have imagined. More of them are following Christ than at any other time in India's history, ministry leaders told CT.

India's church has grown and is getting larger. It now comprises over 70 million members, according to Operation World. That makes it the eighth largest Christian population in the world, just behind the Philippines and Nigeria, bigger than Germany and Ethiopia, and twice the size of the United Kingdom. Unlike believers in those countries, however, India's Christians live among one billion Hindus.

Opportunities for spreading the Good News seem to be everywhere. Operation World counts 2,223 unreached people groups in India, over five times as many as there are in China, the next most unreached nation. "India, Afghanistan, and Pakistan make up the largest concentration of unreached humanity in the world," says Operation World's Jason Mandryk.

Across the vast nation, a visitor hears of unprecedented numbers of people turning to Christ. Operation Mobilization, one of India's largest missionary groups, has grown to include 3,000 congregations in India, up from 300 in less than a decade.

A hospital-based ministry in north India has seen 8,000 baptisms over the past five years after a decade of only a handful. Operation World's detailed statistics show that the Indian church is growing at a rate three times that of India's Hindu population.

Many Indian Christians say that doors closed
for centuries are swinging open.

The 2001 Indian census placed Christians at just over 2 percent of India's population. But currently, Operation World puts the figure near 6 percent and notes that "Christian researchers in India indicate much higher results, even up to 9 percent." Many Indian Christians say that doors closed for centuries are swinging open.

No one can be certain of such trends in this vast and complicated country. Religion statistics are poor, and enthusiastic reports from mission organizations may reflect only local conditions.

Todd Johnson, director of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary's Center for the Study of Global Christianity, says he has opted for more conservative estimates than Operation World's. The center's Atlas of Global Christianity estimates 58 million Indian Christians, not 70 million. Most of the difference lies in Operation World's "unaffiliated" category. The unaffiliated may be part of independent fellowships, or be "insider" Hindu or Muslim followers of Christ.

Nearly all reports of rapid growth come from independent mission and church groups. "I'm waiting to see how they settle," says Johnson. "It's a very volatile situation. Exciting things are happening. That's real. Our methodology is to wait and see, and do our best to track it. But it is remarkable. Everybody agrees with that. It is something new in the last ten years, especially in the north."

"Everybody knows about the massive scale of growth among Dalits," says Mandryk. "That was most of the growth for a few years. Now we see signs of growth in the middling castes and among the under-35s. There's a new dynamic for the urban, educated generation. There's growth happening in upper castes as well."

Though growth rates have not reached what they did in China during its peak growth period of the 1970s and '80s, "it could accelerate," Mandryk says. "It's shifting through the gears and starting to pick up speed. The diversity of castes, areas, and backgrounds is a big factor. Church growth is no longer locked in to Dalit and Tribal groups."

Pushed to Plant Churches

Whatever the growth rate of India's church, India is unquestionably in the midst of rapid social and economic changes. Such transformations contribute to the breakdown of religious traditions, especially India's caste system.

"Hinduism is a tool to keep us oppressed," says T.V. Joy, a church planter in north India. "The gospel is a message of deliverance, not just for heaven. It is a message of freedom. The truth is that God made man in his image." That claim, Joy asserts, undermines traditional conceptions of caste.

Caste, what scholar Kancha Ilaiah calls a "spiritually constructed social system," remains omnipresent in India. At the top are the Brahmins, the only people traditionally allowed to serve as priests. Below them are traditional castes for soldiers and businessmen. These "upper caste" groupings comprise only 15 percent of the population but their members dominate society.

Under them are the Other Backward Castes (OBCs), poor farmers and servants who make up almost half the population.

Below the OBCs are the Dalits, condemned to polluted occupations and lives. Dalits and Tribals make up almost a quarter of the population, and most remain destitute and illiterate. They, more than any other group, have found their way to Jesus.

Through community development, Indian missionaries
demonstrate that Jesus is more than another god to worship.

Somewhere between 70 percent and 90 percent of Christians in India are Dalits. When Dalits become believers, they reinforce the stigma of Christianity as a Dalit religion, worthy of contempt from all other groups.

Caste discrimination exists among Christians too, even between Dalit sub-castes. "The Brahmins have a religion that has gone into the minds of the victims," says Y. Moses, a Dalit activist." 'All one in Christ' is theoretically correct, but practically it is not true. We are not all one in Christ."

Most Indian Christians indicate that their churches have great challenges. Materialism, discrimination, leadership quarrels, and lukewarm faith are all evident. When asked why Indians are coming to Christ in remarkable numbers, leaders point to the work of the Holy Spirit. Then they mention critical factors that undermine traditional Hindu beliefs while making more Indians open to change:

• Urban growth: India has 43 cities that are home to over 1 million people. (The U.S. has 9.) Two-thirds of Indians still live in rural villages, but even villagers are touched by cities, because their children migrate to cities to work. Cities have social fluidity. People of all castes mingle in new ways, and caste identity is less important. Prejudice endures, but it is subtler. Dalits, Tribals, and OBCs can and do rise to the top in urban areas.

• Globalization: Upper-caste Brahmins still dominate business. But multinational corporations hire Indian nationals based on their skill and education, not caste identity. The service sector is growing quickly. A Christian ministry in north India trains air conditioning technicians. Its graduates, nearly all from lower castes, land jobs with multinationals more interested in effectiveness than caste and family ties.

• Education: "Thanks to the missionaries, because they democratized education," says Dalit advocate A. Maria. Many of the best schools in India are private Christian institutions founded by missionaries. No surprise: wealthier (and thus high-caste) students often dominate these schools. Still, many Dalit, Tribal, and OBC students have profited from Christian institutions. Indian mission agencies are starting new schools, including English-medium schools, and students are flooding in. In the new India, mastery of English and high academic credentials trump caste. After the United States, India has the world's largest number of English speakers.

• Democracy: India has had more than 60 years of multi-party elections. In 2009, nearly 60 percent of the 714 million electorate cast ballots to elect a new parliament. Some Christian areas had huge turnouts. For example, northeast India's Nagaland, home to a high percentage of Christians, recorded a 90 percent turnout.

• New missions: India stopped giving visas for foreign missionaries in the 1950s. This decimated Christian hospitals and schools, which relied on foreign skills. But gradually the number of Indian mission agencies has grown. In 1971, there were fewer than 20 Indian mission agencies. Today there are at least 200. An Indian missionary often must learn a new language and an unfamiliar culture far from home—a task as daunting for an Indian as it would be for an American. Yet Operation World counts more than 80,000 Indian missionaries, most serving cross-culturally.

• Persecution: When Hindu fundamentalists won national elections in 1998, they brought an assertive Hinduism that fostered anti-conversion laws and persecution of Christians. Public evangelism became nearly impossible. Indian missionaries retreated from street preaching and public rallies, and instead settled in single locations to open schools, offer economic development and training, and plant house churches.

"God pushed us into church planting," says Operation Mobilization's Alfy Franks. But church planting often goes with other activities like microfinance, education, and medical care. India has thousands of gods and plenty of spirituality; a purely spiritual appeal does not necessarily communicate.

Through community development, Indian missionaries demonstrate that Jesus is more than another god to worship. He is the Lord who transforms life. For poverty-stricken and oppressed Indians—indeed, for Indians of all castes—that message of transformation appeals powerfully.

Health Plus

Newly formed indigenous Christian missions are turning fresh attention to traditional Hindus, many of whom live in the Hindi-speaking heartland of northern India. This north-central region of India has highly fertile land that supports a population of 340 million people.

In Uttar Pradesh, M. A. Raju, a Christian neurologist, heads the Mujwa Mission Hospital. Raju is convinced that this most densely populated region of India is the key to its future. His strategy for spreading the gospel is centered on providing quality health care and basic education for the poor.

Raju has a deep brown face fringed with an ice-white beard. Born in south India to a family of Christian doctors, Raju trained at Vellore, a well-known Christian hospital. Doubting his childhood faith, Raju spent years searching for a belief system that would sustain him. He pondered the great Hindu epics, practiced yoga, worked a stint with Mother Teresa in Kolkata, and studied Islam. His greatest influence turned out to be Francis Schaeffer, the late Christian author and apologist whom he first read in medical school and later spent a summer with at Schaeffer's retreat in L'Abri, Switzerland.

Raju carried his questions on to Israel, where he worked in a Christian hospital for Arabs. There he met a Scottish nurse who was struck by his kindly way. "He was the first really Christian doctor I had ever met," Rani says with a smile. Raju settled his remaining doubts, married Rani, and moved to England. He became a highly successful neurologist while working on the side to integrate psychology with Christian faith. He offered seminars on pastoral counseling to groups all over the United Kingdom.

He was pulled back to India, first raising money for missions, then becoming involved in planning and strategy. Finally in 1991, he and Rani moved to India with their four English-born children. Seven years ago, he took over Mujwa, a sprawling mission hospital that was about to shut down after a long decline. Raju could not bear to see it lost. "Wherever missionaries have gone, whatever their mistakes, the Holy Spirit is there. It's very difficult to get a beachhead. I didn't want to give it up."

The hospital's buildings were in disrepair, and local hostility was high. Several times fundamentalist mobs invaded the grounds, beating up staff. But Mujwa, while still ramshackle, is on the upswing. The hospital first concentrated its resources on basic medical care for the most poor. Soon, other ministry opportunities popped up. The grounds serve as a training center, preparing hundreds of primary school teachers and church planters, and offering vocational training—for electricians, air conditioning technicians, tailors, dental technicians, and others.

Holistic Model

Today, everything at Mujwa is geared to spiritual, social, medical, and economic transformation.

A visit to a nearby village takes me to one of Mujwa's informal primary schools. Traveling on narrow roads through lush fields, we reach an unpaved track that ends at narrow streets snaking between mud houses. On open land next to the village, boys play cricket with handcarved bats. Since this is a school day, their presence indicates how little the village values education.

'Jesus came in a dream and said to me, "Don't worry, I will make your
people come up." '—Tissani, a Dalit teacher

But the government schools are terrible, everyone says. The teachers are often absent and show little interest in students' welfare. Mujwa offers to help villages start a school if they provide a teacher—a villager who has a high-school education and a good reputation.

Mujwa does not seek Christian teachers, because the few who identify as Christians are often alienated from the village. Rather, Mujwa offers two months of teacher training that includes immersion in Christian teaching and worship. Most of the time, they say, teachers begin to follow Christ during their training. The 220 teachers who have stuck to the job get tremendous respect in the village because of their role. And they begin to bring others to Christ.

Such inclusive approaches have met a tremendous spiritual openness. Evangelists saw only a handful of baptisms around Mujwa in the previous generation. They have seen 8,000 in the past five years. 

The school meets in a mud-brick, tin-roof shed that cost $1,200 to build. Most of Mujwa's 100 schools meet under a tree. They all want a building like this one.

Outside the building, 50 ragged children sit on plastic mats, learning their alphabet by chanting out letters. Inside, two more classes are at work. They use simple paperback workbooks provided by the government.

The head teacher, Tissani, is a young woman who finished high school and is pursuing a bachelor's degree. Tissani is a Dalit who married into the village from another village three miles away. She has two boys under age 3, and has taught at the school for three years.

Tissani says many children in the village are not attending school. During teacher training at Mujwa, she developed a deep burden for them. "I had a dream," she says. "Jesus came in a dream and said to me, 'Don't worry, I will make your people come up.'?" She came to believe there is one God, Jesus, whom she seeks to follow.

Asked about her hopes for the school, she has a ready reply. "I want to see all the children become educated like me. And when the girls get married into every village in this area, I want them to start schools like this one."

A smaller village a few miles away is primarily Muslim. Local Muslims do not object to their school teaching Bible verses; they are pleased that their children receive a moral education.

The head teacher is a Brahmin widow who volunteered to help. "But we only work with Dalit children," Raju told her. She said she would be happy to teach Dalits, and started her school under a tree. The woman was baptized as a Christian and now leads the local house church. "This is the new India," Raju says.

Spirit of Change

According to Christian tradition, the apostle Thomas brought his faith to India in the first century, and an ancient church certainly existed in south India centuries before European missionaries arrived in the 1700s.

For generations, Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries have witnessed to their faith. Yet despite much hard labor and many hopes, the Indian church has remained a tiny percentage of the population.

Sometimes, because of abuses, Western Christians shy away from social programs. They take for granted the possibility of economic progress and think it has little to do with faith. In India, however, such programs make the full implications of Christian faith visible. If God made every human being in his image, and if he loves the world, then humans are surely meant to thrive—just as they did in the Garden.

Today, broad economic and cultural reforms are sweeping Indian cities, and villages feel the spirit of change. Indians are choosing new ways of life—and many more are embracing the gospel and following Christ. Researchers agree that India has more Christians now than at any other time in its 4,000-year history.

Tim Stafford is a senior writer for Christianity Today based in northern California. John Stott Ministries has provided a grant to Christianity Today for reporting on international issues.

Copyright © 2011 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Related Elsewhere:

A Christianity Today audio slideshow on India is available via YouTube.

Previous CT coverage of India includes:

Dead Space: Christians Demand Burial Land in Crowded Kathmandu | Nepal's Supreme Court due to rule Monday on Christian and Hindu lawsuits. (April 8, 2011)

Radicals Rejected | Orissa Christians breathe easier after election defeat of Hindu extremists. (June 22, 2009)

Terror in Orissa | It's time for India to start acting like the world's largest democracy. (October 9, 2008)

Additional coverage of India from Christianity Today's blog Hermenuetics includes:

The Lost Girls of China and India | Why so many baby girls are being killed in the world's two largest countries. (June 29, 2011)

India: It's Complicated | By sticking to her ashram, Elizabeth Gilbert misses out—and so do her readers. (August 12, 2010)

First Dalit Woman Elected to India Parliament | Christian groups hope Meira Kumar will raise profile of India's Untouchables. (June 15, 2009)

How Emergent and Evangelical Churches See Themselves in a World of Servitude and Politics

To Kyle's article below I can only applaud his wisdom and humble understanding of what the church of God truly is. Well done!

R.E. Slater
July 9, 2011

* * * * * * * * * *

No Power? No Problem: Reflections on Evangelicals and Influence

http://www.patheos.com/Resources/Additional-Resources/No-Power-No-Problem-Kyle-Roberts-06-29-2011?offset=0&max=1

by Kyle Roberts

posted June 28, 2011

Is evangelicalism losing influence in the United States? Yes, answer a majority of Global North evangelical leaders surveyed at the recent Lausanne conference on evangelism.

The suggestion is not a shocking one to anyone familiar with the ebb and flow of the movement in its contemporary forms. But the gloomy outlook of evangelical leaders provokes a good bit of reflection (in particular when you compare the pessimism of Northern hemisphere evangelicals to the optimism of their Southern hemisphere counterparts).

A majority of global North evangelicals (54%) believe that in five years the situation for evangelicals will be either worse than now (33%) or about the same as now (21%). By comparison, 71 percent of leaders in the Global South believe the state of evangelicalism will improve. Yet the finding that most fascinates me relates to perceptions of evangelicalism's influence. In the North, only 31 percent of leaders expect to see evangelical influence grow, compared to 66 percent who expect evangelical influence to diminish. In the South, 58 percent expect an increase while 39 percent expect a decrease in influence.

What shall we say to this?

As Samuel Johnson noted, "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." A perception of impending doom or coming decline forces those invested in that declining movement to gather their thoughts, re-focus their vision, and change course as necessary.

When the picture is accepted for what it is, rather than explained away as a series of anomalies or misinterpretations of data, then people can begin to shape creative solutions and re-imagine their future.

The question cannot simply be: How can evangelicalism recover its social influence? For one thing, the definition of the term evangelical is no longer stable. What counts as evangelical, on what basis, and who decides? The increasing ethnic diversity of American evangelicalism is complicating the picture. New studies show increasing diversity in how evangelicals, particularly younger ones, approach social issues, with homosexual marriage being the obvious current example. With such diversity underlying the movement, how can its social influence be measured?

But a deeper question remains. Could a decline of evangelical influence be a good thing for the gospel?

What is the task of the followers of Jesus? What is our vocation? Jesus said it is to be "the salt of the earth," the "light of the world," and a "city on a hill" (Mt. 5:13-14). Evangelicals have often brought to these images the assumption that saltiness and brightness = power as a voting block and a lobbying force. But those assumptions misconstrue the nature of the ecclesia, the gathering of disciples that seeks to follow Christ in the world and that understands its calling to suffering on behalf of and for the church (Col. 1:24) for the sake of the world (Mt. 28).

We too often measure the role and influence of the church with the barometers of the modern corporation or political program, barometers that are foreign to Jesus and the gospels. We too often gauge "success" by the extent to which our collective voice reinforces a particular, homogenous vision of life and minimizes our discomfort with difference and otherness. Evangelicals have too often seen ourselves as purveyors of a product or an ideology. Perhaps the better way to conceive of the church's identity and mission is as a diaspora: a scattered faithful remnant who seek to be servants of the gospel through the loving, gracious, non-coercive acts of witness. We are called to live out the implications of the gospel with humility and hospitality, pointing to the source of hope in Jesus.

Perhaps the evangelical church in the United States should embrace a decline of social influence in order to be God's elect who suffer in and for a broken world. When the church as an institution is perceived as powerful, it is often prone to triumphalism, exclusion, and self-preservation. As Karl Barth reminded us, the vocation of Christians and of the church is simply to serve the world by witnessing to the gospel. Since Pentecost, there has always been a historical church (in whatever form) to serve in this way. God uses the Church (including evangelical churches), but he doesn't require it. As Barth put it, "God does not belong to the Church" (The Epistle to the Romans [Oxford 1933, trans. Hoskyns], p. 339).

In the midst of this mainly gloomy picture of the Church lies a hopeful point: it is precisely because of its guilt, its transience, its negative instrumentality that the church plays a central role in God's economy of revelation, salvation, and reconciliation in the world. The way forward is to give obedient witness to the paradoxical reality of God's grace as manifest in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

It is not for us in the North to surmise what Christians in the Global South should make of the optimism of their leaders toward the future of their evangelical movements and their influence in society. But here in the United States, perhaps we should embrace the apparent impending decline in social influence as an opportunity to follow Jesus to the margins of society. Furthermore, perhaps we should embrace an increasing diversity within evangelicalism itself as a fruitful development toward serving a complex, variegated world.

North America sits at the center of a shift from modernism to postmodernism to whatever comes after that (if that hasn't already come). Ours is a world shot through with plurality and difference, fragmentation and fissure, indeterminacy and openness. How can we speak the gospel into a world bereft of unity, stability, meaning, and hope? Only through the posture of witness and "faithful presence," a presence that is self-consciously fragile enough to engage the world without breaking it further. We are pots of clay. We are witnesses to the Gospel of grace. That's all.

The Church is vastly bigger than evangelicalism. And the kingdom of God is bigger than the Church. This means that any decline in evangelicalism's power and influence does not signal the end of God's work. But it may be that through recognition of our declining influence and by the practice of witness we can find God at work in us and through us in greater ways than we could have imagined.

Kyle Roberts is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology and Lead Faculty of Christian Thought, Bethel Seminary (St. Paul, MN). He researches and writes on issues related to the intersection of theology, philosophy, and culture. Follow Kyle Roberts' reflections on faith and culture at his blog or via Twitter.

Roberts' column, "Theological Provocations," is published every second Tuesday on the Evangelical portal. Subscribe via email or RSS.

A Leap of Truth, Part 1: Evolutionary Creation

June 29, 2011

I will be adding articles pertaining to both theistic evolution and creationism within the science sections of this emergent blog beginning with Biologos' Leap of Faith series. For myself, I am not concerned with having an immediate answer within this arena. I believe God created the world but the how, the processes he used, the when, and the time it took, seem to have blurred in the face of the more advance theories of evolution, the latest cosmological and geological discoveries pertaining to these theories, and the quantum projections occurring in math and physics at the center of all of this. At this point, I prefer the idea of Creationism but am willing to examine the arguments for Theistic Evolution as counterpoint without the need to crucify or bury either one.


How these issues pertain to emergent Christianity comes in several ways. Postmodern Christians seem more willing to consider the latest discoveries and theories of science without becoming alarmist; they are more willing to rethink and adapt traditional biblical theories to those discoveries - especially as pertaining to the ancient biblical creation story's understanding's both then, in the ancient mind, and now, in the (post)modern mindset; emergent Christians seem to be characterized with a patient study and examination of seminal biblical issues through the careful re-framing of relevant questions (as well as answers) in light of newer discoveries; and they seem to have the quiet assurance that through all of this God is God, and man is but a finite being, as he attempts to look back in time to the birth of both his and the world's origins as he posits viable corollaries and theories of God's creation.


In contrast, my experience with evangelical Christians show an immediate need for Creation-based answers (whether real or forced); seem more skeptical with science's advance discoveries and resultant theoretical suppositions as pertaining to biblical creation; are more easily alarmed by non-traditional interpretations to the biblical record; refuse to acknowledge or incorporate advancements in forensic language development, psychological/sociological anthropological studies, and philosophical issues (sic, currently post-continentalism for one) as pertaining to man-centered spiritual issues; they prefer to cling to traditional religious arguments and interpretations; and refuse to be satisfied with framing open-ended questions that give no conclusions to the Genesis record.


Hence, it is my purpose here to proceed without regard to evangelic fears and beliefs knowing that our faith is still as real, as vibrant, as necessary, regardless of either traditional religious skepticism or the agnostic/atheistic response of non-Christians. For our Creator God is (I am who I am), as is his active relationship with his creation, and is supportable regardless of religious or irreligious groups and spokespersons denying either contrarywise or otherwise.


- skinhead

**********

June 29, 2011

Hello everyone,

My name is Ryan Pettey, and I am a documentary filmmaker who has been amazingly blessed to work on a feature-length documentary over the last year and a half called A Leap of Truth.

With A Leap of Truth, we wanted to put something proactive on the table that could help motivate an elevated conversation about the “war” between science and faith. It was our goal to help Christians see (and accept) the complexity of the issues raised by modern science, as well as help them to courageously engage with the theological conversations happening within the sphere of Christian culture today. We wanted the film to address the topic hermeneutically, historically, and socially in order to gain a better perspective on the issues, and, hopefully, address some of the fears (justified or otherwise) concerning what science is telling us about our physical origins.

Personally, this project has been a spiritual shot in the arm and has whole-heartedly reignited my walk with God. I have been truly humbled by my opportunity to speak with so many incredible theologians, scientists, biblical scholars, and authors. As a result of this project, the book of Genesis has become more alive and more dynamic than I had ever allowed it to be. It is my hope that this film will both challenge and inspire people of faith, no matter where they are on their journey, to revere the complexity of God both through his word and his creation.

Through the BioLogos Forum, I will be posting a few short, topic driven clips from the film in the coming weeks as conversation starters

This first clip titled “Evolutionary Creationism” poses these particularly important questions to the Evangelical Christian community:

1. John Polkinghorne says, “The doctrine of creation is not about how things began, it’s about why things exist.” What does this mean?
2. Is it reasonable that God’s method of creation would be an unfolding process such as evolution? In other words, does an evolutionary process uphold God’s character as revealed in the scriptures? If so, how?

Thanks for watching!

Ryan Pettey
Director
 A Leap of Truth

A Leap of Truth - Evolutionary Creation

http://biologos.org/blog/a-leap-of-truth

Click link above to view video

“Evolutionary Creation” Transcript

Dr. John Polkinghorne: “The doctrine of creation isn’t about how things began, it’s about why things exist, what holds the world in being. The Christian belief is that it is the will of God that holds the world in being.”

Dr. Jeff Schloss: “No matter how you think the creation began and the process of the emergence of life occurred, if you are a Christian, you believe that God is mightily hands on.”

Dr. Alister McGrath

Dr. Jeff Schloss

Reverend Dr. Lincoln Harvey

Dr. Jeff Schloss: “Well, why does God use history to achieve his purposes? Why not just have created everything right to begin with? And then, if it were made wrong at a point in time by Adam and Eve falling, why not just have Christ die right there in the Garden and have salvation? Why wait thousands of years for the revelation of Christ? And we don’t get to have the answer to that.”

Reverend Dr. John Polkinghorne: “That shows us that God is patient and subtle, that God is prepared to create through process, unfolding process, rather than through just divine magic decree.”

Dr. Jeff Schloss: “If you believe that every kind of living organism was supernaturally created by God, then, in one sense, every organism is unique, and the cheetah is the fastest organism, and the redwood tree is the largest organism, and they are all specially and supernaturally and distinctly created by God; they are all unique. If you believe in common descent and believe in evolutionary theory, then there is a sense in which no organisms are unique to the extent that they can be explained by the common mechanism of mutation and selection. When we look at human beings, human beings do things that, as of yet, are actually not adequately explainable by the common mechanism of genetic mutation and natural selection.”

Reverend Dr. Michael Lloyd: “What Mother Teresa did on the streets of Calcutta is not evolutionary useful. It is taking limited resources and giving them to people who are dying. That is not, from a survival point of view, useful. And yet, most of us think, that it’s a rather good thing.”

Dr. Jeff Schloss: “This is not a God-of-the-Gaps argument attempting to prove that there is a miracle or supernatural causes at work—that actually might be the case. But it might also be the case that there are natural causes at work, designed by God, not operating in other organisms, unique to human beings. Right now, evolutionary theory actually gives content to and illuminates the reality of human uniqueness. E.O. Wilson says that this capacity that humans have for unusual degrees of cooperative sacrifice is the culminating mystery of all biology.”

Dr. Richard Colling: “So when we talk about evolution, it is really not a matter of death and destruction imposed upon humanity and all forms of life. Evolution, from a geneticist standpoint, is really a game about probability and potential and hope and possibilities—the same thing that the New Testament says that Christians should be all about.”

Dr. Kerry Fulcher: “In Colossians, it tells us that in him all things hold together. I think God’s creation is continuing to unfold. As it continues to unfold and as we have new species that are being generated, that is not in absence of God’s creative power. Creation is not this one time deal in the past, but God is intricately involved now.”

Dr. Jeff Schloss: “There is a fabulous and profound thematic continuity to the history of life: for example, the transition from primitive prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic cells, the transition from single cells to multi-cells, the transition from asexual, basically clonally individually reproducing organisms, to sexually reproducing organisms that have to do it together, the transition from individual to social organisms. Well, there is really no other way to put this, it is progressive. It is exactly what we would expect if a God, who we already believe on the basis of the sacred history of redemption described in scripture, is also involved in incrementally achieving his purposes over the entire course of history.”

Reverend Dr. John Polkinghorne: “And when you come to think about it…if the nature of God is love, as Christians believe, then I think that is the way you would expect the God of love to create, not through just brute power, but by the unfolding of fruitful potentiality.”

Dr. Darrel Falk: “If people think because of scientific evidence, ‘my Christian faith doesn’t stake up anymore’—that day needs to end. All of the richness in life that I know is because of my relationship with God, and so I don’t want people to miss out on that. I don’t want people abandoning the faith because they find out that evolution is really real. It is God’s truth. So here we have this segment, this all-important segment of God’s people, who are out of touch with God’s reality. I mean, it is God’s universe! This natural world is God’s creation—and so the people, who especially need to be in touch with God’s reality, are off in a corner.”

True Religion or True Faith?

True Religion      

http://www.jrdkirk.com/2011/07/08/true-religion/

by J.R. Daniel Kirk

posted July 8, 2011

For a chapter whose overall title is “The Revelation of God as the Abolition of Religion,” there sure is a lot Karl Barth managed to sneak in that sounds rather in favor of [the] said institution. For example: [there is] a whole subsection entitled, “True Religion” (§17.3).

Barth takes the human dimension of our religious expression quite seriously. For [to live in] this [present] world as it is - to take the human dimension seriously - is to take the sinful human dimension seriously. And so, for religion in general, as for persons in particular, the only way to stand approved before God is to be justified, forgiven, and so-wrapped-up-into-a-process-of-putting-on-display-the-story-of-Christ in sanctification.

Christian religion becomes true, not simply because it “is,” but because God adopts it and sanctifies it and speaks-to-it-and-through-it; thus, the Christian religion is a recepient of God’s grace. When KB was talking about religion as unbelief, Christianity was not excluded, in principle, from that word of judgment. “Christian religion is true only as we listen to the divine revelation” (326).

Barth suggests that in striving to hold up Christian religion itself as the source of our confidence, we lose out on the very confidence we seek to take hold of. In a manner analogous to the weakness of looking to ourselves as proof positive of God at work in the world, taking hold of Christian religion will prove vacuous. Instead of taking hold of the religion, we [are to] take hold of the revelation of God in Christ - this turning from religion to the thing revealed is the way in which to hold to a proper confidence that the religion itself is faithfully participating in the work of God.

In this section, Barth gives a magnificent account of the history of Christianity as it has positioned itself over against other religions. To claim it is better on the same basis by which all religions are judged is to sell the farm. Apologetics of superiority belie the Christian confession that “grace is the truth of Christianity” (333); i.e., the self-giving grace of God in Christ.

In the end, the reality of simil justus et peccator applies to the church as well: not as a cop-out and a means to escape the pursuit of holiness, but as a confession that the church as such will never show by its history that it is, as a religious institution, superior to the world around it. The church is continually judged by its willingness to accept that its whole existence is a continuing work of grace. In light of this revelation it is judged for its failure and called afresh to live in a manner pleasing to God.

How to hide a lie in the truth (via the Marx Brothers)

http://peterrollins.net/?p=2899

by Peter Rollins

posted July 4, 2011

While exploring the inner workings of language the theorist Lacan once offered a fascinating and deep reflection on the tracks left by different animals. He noted that most animals simply leave tracks in their wake; tracks that can act as a sign that they have passed that way. As such a hunter can look at these traces and work out where the prey will be.

There are however a few animals that cover up their tracks in an effort to efface the sign that would point to their location. In these situations a hunter must look very carefully to try and find the effects of this erasure.

And then there are a select few that make false tracks. Tracks designed to fool a hunter into going the wrong direction. Here only a hunter with a specific knowledge of the prey will know that the tracks they see are a sign that the animal did not pass that way.

However there is another, even more sophisticated, level than this. One in which the real tracks are intended to signal that the animal has not gone in the direction they suggest (a strategy that perhaps only animals of language – e.g. humans – can enact).

These different levels can be listed as such,

- The tracks are real and accurately direct the hunter (erased tracks fall into this category as long as there is some evidence of the erasure)

- The tracks are unreal and attempt to misdirect the hunter

- The tracks are real and attempt to misdirect the hunter

In short the third level refers to the possibility of employing the blatant truth in order to mislead the one looking at the sign.

To understand how this works take the example of a religious leader who is part of a community that actively holds repressive/naive views regarding such things as gender roles, gay and lesbian rights, biblical interpretation and scientific reflection. If the religious leader actually holds such views themselves they will quickly attempt to justify the churches position in a variety of (often contradictory) ways. However there is a more interesting phenomenon whereby the leader fully and freely acknowledges the repressive positions held by their community.

What is interesting about this position is how their willingness to admit that they materially participate in a repressive community operates. For when one speaks to such a person one is generally led to think that they are not what they fully claim to be. The honesty causes one to think that they are other than what they are. We are led to think that their intelligence and ability to admit the dark underbelly of their community means that they are better than the community they are part of, that they should not to be overly identified with that community and perhaps even that they must be trying to influence it for the better.

In such situations we would do well to take Slavoj Žižek’s advice and hold tight to the wisdom of the Marx brothers when they say,

This guy may act like an idiot and look like an idiot, but don’t be fooled; he really is an idiot

God Wins: Heaven, Hell and Why the Good News is Better than Love Wins

Mark Galli - Response to "Love Wins"

http://www.patheos.com/community/rogereolson/2011/07/07/a-good-new-book-responding-to-bells-love-wins/

By Roger Olson

July 7, 2011

A publisher recently sent me an advance copy of what I take to be the first full book length response to Love Wins by Rob Bell and asked me to review it here. I’m happy to do that.

The book is entitled God Wins: Heaven, Hell and Why the Good News is Better than Love Wins. The author is Mark Galli, senior managing editor of Christianity Today magazine. The book is published by Tyndale House Publishers.

I know Mark Galli and respect him highly. I led a church-based discussion group in reading and discussing his book Jesus Mean and Wild. We found it a bracingly helpful corrective to overly sentimental ideas of Jesus in much contemporary Christianity and folk religion.

Mark is a serious evangelical scholar with an irenic approach to controversial material. While he takes on Love Wins with vigorous criticism, he is careful to give the author, Rob Bell, the benefit of the doubt as to his intentions. In almost every chapter Mark says he thinks Bell does not intend errors he inadvertently promotes.

Before I interact with Mark’s book, let me say that you should read the book for yourself and not take my word for anything–except that it is a serious book deserving thoughtful consideration by both Bell’s critics and admirers. (Here by “Bell’s” I mean Love Wins’.)

God Wins goes to great lengths to express agreement with much of Love Wins. Mark does not sweepingly condemn the book or dismiss it as unworthy of consideration. He has clearly taken the time to read it carefully and try to understand it fairly before expressing disagreement with it. And his criticisms are, for the most part, generous toward the author.

However, God Wins pulls no punches. Mark clearly considers it a dangerous book that will probably lead many readers astray–not from Christianity into atheism or anything like that but from a better focused and truer picture of God to a fuzzier and largely erroneous one.

Chapter 1 is entitled The Really Important Question. There Mark argues that Bell misses the mark by raising too many questions about God that imply an attempt to interrogate God. Mark says “as the Cross demonstrates, God takes us seriously. He takes our sin seriously. But he continues to show relative indifference to our questions. He does not answer them to our intellectual satisfaction; he refuses to submit himself to our interrogations.” (14)

I wonder, however, whether Mark (I am not calling him “Galli” out of disrespect but because I know him personally and it would be awkward to call him by his last name when we are on a first name basis) is confusing interrogation of ideas about God with interrogation of God. When I read Love Wins I did not sense Bell intending to interrogate God. His questions, I thought, were aimed at traditional notions about God.

This first point gives me opportunity to say something about different interpretations of the same book. Sometimes when I am reading Mark’s account of Bell’s book I feel like he read a different book than I did! I get the sense that Mark felt things that I did not feel and that I felt things Mark (and others) did not feel. I’m not trying to reduce interpretation to feelings. I’m just saying that people often get a different sense about a book.

I thought Bell was reacting to what he perceived to be an overly harsh picture of God as a distant judge delighting in sending people to hell and to an all-too-common attitude among some Christians that hell is a good thing–as if we should celebrate every time we think someone goes there because it reinforces our sense of retributive justice. So I filled in some gaps as I read, giving Bell the benefit of the doubt and taking for granted that he was trying to correct those images and was not trying to say everything one could say about the subjects.

I think Mark read the book differently–as Bell being seduced by a liberal approach to life and the world and God that places man at the center and God at the periphery. One reason I didn’t think that is because almost everything Bell says about God and heaven and hell can be found in well-respected evangelical theologians or theologians most evangelicals respect like C. S. Lewis. (Okay, I know Lewis wasn’t technically a theologian, but he wrote theology better than many professional theologians do!)

But my point is that I get it–Mark “sees” a gestalt, a pattern in Bell’s book I didn’t see. We read the same book but saw it “as” different things. I think that may be because Mark is a member of a denomination struggling with rampant liberalism in which conservatives (by which here I mean people who value traditional, orthodox, biblical Christianity) feel embattled. I, on the other hand, have been beset by fundamentalists and aggressive neo-fundamentalist heresy-hunters. So I read Bell as a fellow questioner of that kind of ultra-conservative Christianity whereas Mark read him, I suspect, as an unintentional ally giving aid and comfort to the liberals destroying his denomination. Well, all that is surmise and guess work. I just don’t know how else to make sense of how Mark and I read the same book and came away with such radically different interpretations.

So, where Mark saw Love Wins reveling in unaswered questions that attempt to put God in the dock, so to speak, I saw the book as simply challenging certain cherished but often unreflective assumptions about God among conservative Christians.

Chapter 2 is entitled Who Is This God? The chapter’s thesis is that “Love Wins tends to come across as beautiful and exciting–but ultimately thin and sentimental. It does not communicate the gravity, the thickness, the mystery of God.” There I began to suspect that we are dealing with two different visions of God–one the hidden, mysterious, awesome and transcendent God of Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Edwards and Spurgeon (Mark quotes the latter two) and the other the very personal, intimate, loving and profoundly caring (for his creatures) God of the Greek fathers, Wesley and Moltmann.

Of course that’s a simplistic dualism. But so is Mark’s. In this chapter Mark posits two accounts of God–one is “God as agent” (bad, wrong) and the other is “God the Lover” (good, right). The picture of God as agent puts humans at the center and views God primarily as existing to serve us and our needs. The picture of God as lover puts the Trinity at the center and views God primarily as existing in and for himself as inner-trinitarian love that then overflows in grace to creatures. Mark says “…only when we see God as Lover can we understand how God is more than mere Agent. As wonderful as it is to experience the benefits of his grace and mercy, they should never be the focal point. The minute they become the focus, they disappear. It’s like happiness–make it your goal, and you’ll never reach it. The blessings of life in Christ, like happiness, are the result of something else, something that has objectively happened–Christ’s death and resurrection.” (32)

I can’t imagine that Bell would disagree with that! And my reaction to the dualism between “God as Agent” and “God as the Lover” is to ask why these have to be in conflict with each other? I guess Mark is arguing it is a matter of which comes first. Giving Bell the benefit of the doubt, I would say he would also put God as the Lover before God as Agent. Perhaps he could have made that clearer in Love Wins. Mark sees Bell as inadvertently making our experience of God’s blessings THE central feature of the gospel rather than secondary to God’s glorious nature and sacrifice for us in Jesus Christ. In other words, Mark thinks Bell puts the accent on the subjective too much whereas the accent ought to be on the objective content of what God has done for us out of the inner resources of his own being in Jesus Christ.

Is this a case of wanting a book to be and do something it wasn’t designed to be and do? In other words, might it be that Bell ASSUMES things Mark thinks he should STATE explicitly? Every book begins with certain assumptions. As an author I can testify to that. I have often been criticized for not highlighting or underscoring something I THOUGHT I could take for granted and assume as common ground with my readers.

Mark ends chapter 2 with this summary statement of its point: “As great as forgiveness is, it is not our exceeding joy. As wonderful as are the blessings of salvation, they are not our exceeding joy. Our exceeding joy is God, the God who has brought us into his very presence through Jesus Christ.” (33) Would Bell disagree with that? I doubt it. But I can’t be sure. Maybe that’s Mark’s point–one can’t be sure, so Bell should have been more clear and explicit IF that’s what he believes. On the other hand, perhaps Bell would argue (with some right, I think) that these two things should not be prioritized. IF God withheld the blessings of salvation from us, we would have no reason to have exceeding joy in God. We have exceeding joy in God for who he is and what he has done for us in Jesus Christ BECAUSE he has extended the benefits of his grace and mercy to us for our salvation. Is there something wrong with looking at it that way? Well, I suspect Jonathan Edwards and John Piper would think there is. But does Mark? I don’t know. I can only hope not.

Chapter 3 is entitled Becoming One Again and is about God’s highest aim. At least that’s what I think it is about. It’s about several things. But before I interact with the chapter’s content I have to comment on the “hook” at its beginning. (Every chapter begins with a story which authors call a “hook”–something to lure readers further in.) Mark confesses that when he was in college he went to see the movie The Summer of ‘42. I guess we’re about the same age! (I thought so, but this pretty much proves it.) That was the first movie I ever saw in a movie theater. I snuck into it just to find out what was so awful and evil about movies in movie theaters. (The church I grew up in wouldn’t even take our youth group to see a Billy Graham film shown in a secular movie theater! We were taught that if Jesus returned while we were in a movie theater it wouldn’t matter what movie we were watching, we’d be left behind!) You have to remember movies back then didn’t have ratings. I remember watching some of the scenes through my fingers and fearing God was going to strike me dead just for seeing parts of them and hearing them! Well, Mark’s story and mine are quite different, but I thought it was interesting that we both went to see The Summer of ‘42 while in college! Shame on him!

Back to the book. In this chapter (Becoming One Again) Mark rakes Love Wins over the coals (gently, of course) for neglecting (not completely denying) the substitutionary atonement model in favor of Christus Victor (which is not false but by itself inadequate) and for implying (not outrightly stating) that the main purpose of the life, death and resurrection of Christ was to maximize our fulfillment as persons through an experience of wholeness. Mark says “…one cannot help but notice how relentlessly human centered these descriptions [of the cross and atonement] are. The Cross becomes about our getting inspired and being sustained. Salvation becomes about something that satisfies our deepest longings.” (52) Then, “It’s not just about what we experience but about what God has done.”

Mark’s point seems to be that Love Wins neglects the objective dimension of the cross in favor of the subjective dimension. Toward the end of the chapter Mark accuses Love Wins of downplaying God’s justice in the cross. “The book is so anxious to show that love wins, it fails to appreciate how important it is that justice also wins.” (57) There may be some truth to that. But, again, I wonder how much of this is due to Bell’s tendency to react to overly harsh, one-sided depictions of God’s wrath in some fundamentalist circles. Nowhere does he deny that the cross displays God’s justice or wrath. I guess Mark wants that highlighted more and perhaps Bell should have done that. I admit that when I read Love Wins I took some things for granted. I took it for granted that Bell believes the cross was God’s judgment on sin as well as the ultimate expression of God’s love. How could the cross BE an expression of God’s love if it isn’t also a display of God’s justice?

Mark’s major point in this chapter is, I think, that Bell’s book simply doesn’t do justice to the fullness of the cross and resurrection event. He reads Love Wins as implicitly if not explicitly playing up the benefits of the cross and resurrection for our human fulfillment and downplaying (not explicitly denying) the propitiatory aspect of the satisfaction of God’s righteousness by the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ on the cross. But perhaps one could point to many conservative treatments of the cross event and say that they leave out entirely God’s concern for our well-being because he loves us. Some theologians and pastors have said recently that Christ died “for God” and not for us. Was Bell perhaps reacting to that kind of one-sided treatment of the cross? Could Mark give Bell credit for wanting to balance such popular treatments of the atonement with an emphasis on God’s real care and concern for our fulfillment because he loves us?

Chapter 4 is entitled The Wonder of Faith. Here is where I almost stumbled. By that I mean I almost slapped the book shut and put it down thinking I couldn’t say anything kind about it. But I’m glad I persevered and even read it twice. In the end I still struggle with it, but I think Mark is trying to give a balanced account of God’s sovereignty and human freedom. I’m not sure he succeeds, but few do!

Mark accuses Love Wins of focusing too much on human freedom as free choice. Interpreting [accusing - s.h.] Bell’s book as semi-Pelagian, Mark says “This is precisely the problem with Love Wins and with any belief system that ultimately says that faith is left completely in the hands of sinful and fickle people. That is not good news.” (66-67)

He’s right about that–except that I’m not entirely convinced Love Wins intends that. Where I think Mark may be interpreting Love Wins too harshly is when he writes that “What is assumed in this entire discussion in Love Wins is that the human will is free, autonomous, and able to choose between alternatives. The discussion assumes that the will is not fallen, that it needs no salvation, that it doesn’t even need help. It assumes that human beings are unbiased moral agents who stand above the fray and make independent decisions about the most important matters.” (71)

Wow. If that’s true, then Love Wins is heretical! But I’m not convinced it’s true. Now I’m going to have to go back and re-read Love Wins in this light to find out. This is certainly not how I read the book. But, again, maybe I was giving Bell the benefit of the doubt and reading prevenient grace into his discussions of free will (e.g., where he talks about God giving us what we want–even hell).

I thought Mark was going off on a Calvinist rant against anything that smacks of Arminianism until I came to this paragraph: “And that’s the gospel. Not that we have an innate free will, but that God in his freedom came to us to rescue us from spiritual slavery. Through the work of Jesus on the cross, and through the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit, our wills are liberated. Then and only then can we actually recognize Christ, his love, his forgiveness, his grace. Then and only then can we finally respond in faith.” (72)

I can only say “Amen!” to that. And I say amen as an Arminian. That expresses perfectly what Arminians believe. My question is whether Bell would disagree with that paragraph. I hope not and I think not. But clearly Mark, an astute reading with profound acumen, thinks so. I hope he’s wrong.

But here and there throughout this chapter there are hints of something more than classical Arminianism. Mark says on page 65 that God sometimes makes it impossible for people to believe. And he leaves open the question of whether God withholds himself from some people (reprobation?). But if it is Calvinism it’s soft compared to Piper or Sproul. I can agree with at least ninety percent of this chapter, but I wonder if Bell would disagree with any of it?

Again, is this a case of an author taking something for granted, knowing his readers are evangelicals and therefore probably already conditioned to believe that God is sovereign in salvation (at least to the extent that salvation is God’s initiative and not ours)? Clearly Mark thinks Bell shouldn’t take that for granted and maybe that he doesn’t even believe it himself. When I read Love Wins I took for granted that Bell believes our ability to accept God’s gracious offer of salvation in Jesus Christ is grace-enabled. Perhaps I was wrong. But is it wrong to give an author the benefit of the doubt?

Chapter 5 is entitled The Point of Heaven. There Mark repeats his concern that Love Wins’ main emphasis is on human fulfillment and enjoyment rather than on God. He criticizes Bell for neglecting the biblical dimension of worship in heaven in favor of emphasis on humanization. Again, when I read Love Wins I took for granted that Bell believes we will worship God in heaven and was simply trying to open some new possibilities about our continuing spiritual growth in heaven. And that he was trying to overcome the all too common folk religious idea that in heaven we will be something other than human because humanness is intrinsically evil. (As a professor of theology for almost 30 years I can tell you that is a common belief among young evangelicals!)

Chapter 6 is entitled Hell and Judgment. There, among other criticisms, Mark accuses Love Wins of implying, if not outrightly saying, that people in hell may have a chance to leave and go to heaven. I did think Bell was suggesting that in Love Wins. But so was C. S. Lewis in The Great Divorce. In fact, I read Love Wins as simply restating much of what is in that book so beloved by many even conservative evangelicals! Mark doesn’t see any biblical warrant for that and neither do I. It is sheer speculation based on the character of God. But Bell would simply ask if God is love and “love” means anything similar to what our highest ideas of love based on Scripture itself (e.g., 1 Cor. 13) how could God ever completely give up on anyone? Mark raises some valid questions and concerns about that speculation. But I’m not with him in his criticism that if people can go from hell to heaven it is necessarily the case that people could go from heaven to hell. That overlooks deification–not just an Eastern Orthodox idea. Wesley believed in it and used it as the reason why the redeemed will not be able to sin in heaven even though they will still have free will.

Chapter 7 is entitled The Bad News: Universalism. That’s an intriguing title and you should get the book and read the chapter for yourself. I’ll just say that I agree that universalism is bad news. But perhaps not for the same reason Mark thinks it is. But my main concern with this chapter is that Mark, like many serious theologians in the Reformed tradition, seems to confuse freedom with free will in non-Reformed theologies. What I mean is, he/they think we non-Reformed evangelicals (Arminians, Anabaptists) identify freedom with free will. We don’t. I don’t know about Bell. Perhaps he does confuse or identify them. I hope not.

Let me explain. As Mark helpfully points out, true freedom is NOT having free choice. True freedom is being what God intends for us to be–his faithful creatures restored in his image and likeness glorifying him. Arminians agree with that. But we don’t have that right now. What we do have right now is free will–a gift of God’s prevenient grace whose purpose is to be used to cooperate with God’s renewing and redeeming grace to arrive at true freedom–something God wants for us but will not impose on us. So free will is not true freedom. But it is real. True freedom is yet to be even though we may, by God’s grace, taste it here and now.

Mark thinks Bell revels too much in free will and confuses it with true freedom. I hope not. I didn’t get that sense from Love Wins.

The final chapter, Chapter 8, is entitled The Victory of a Personal God and this review is getting too long. I would be surprised if anyone read this far (except Mark)! I hope some will, but I’d better close or nobody, maybe not even Mark (!) will read on.

Let me wrap up. I get the feeling that Mark wants Love Wins to be something that wouldn’t have gotten any attention at all–a rehearsal of traditional evangelical theology. Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps nobody should offer up anything else. (I’m not saying Mark says that, but I wonder how far one could stray from it without being criticized.)

On the other hand, I think Love Wins does push the envelope of evangelical theology. I don’t think it strays into heresy or even flirts with it, but it does intend to shock people out of their dogmatic slumbers into thinking hard about what they believe and it does intend to present them with some possibilities that are outside the evangelical mainstream. How much Bell himself is committed to those possibilities remains something of a mystery, I think.

The strange thing is this. I find myself agreeing with BOTH BOOKS! How can that be? I don’t mean I agree with everything in both books. That would land me in sheer contradiction.

To explain, let me once again appeal to something Karl Barth said. Two of Barth’s interpreters had an argument about Barth’s belief about God in himself versus God for us. Barth said both were right–vis-a-vis the extremes they were using Barth to fight against (one of which was Bultmann and I forget the other one). Both couldn’t be right. But both could be right vis-a-vis the perspectives they were using Barth to contradict. Could it be that Bell is right (not wholly or completely but overall and in general) as an antidote to traditional “Sinners in the hands of an angry God,” hellfire and damnation, “let’s take delight in all those sinners going to hell” fundamentalist folk religion. Could it be that Mark is right (not wholly or completely but overall and in general) as an antidote to serious lacunae in Bell’s theology brought about by his concern to correct extreme views of God’s wrath and hell?

In other words, would Bell perhaps have Mark’s perspective if he were in Mark’s place–trying to preserve biblical faith in a denomination in serious decline due to rampant liberal theology? And would Mark perhaps have Bell’s perspective if he were in Bell’s place–trying to hold out a vision of God’s love in an evangelical world still fraught with hellfire and damnation preachers of God’s arbitrary sovereignty who sends people to hell for his glory?

Well, maybe not. And I suspect both authors will think I’m belittling them which is not my intention. I take them both seriously. I just wonder if they are both right given their [religious] contexts and perspectives?

Ask An Atheist

Ask an Atheist…(Hemant responds)

http://rachelheldevans.com/ask-an-atheist-response

by Rachel Held Evans

posted July 5, 2011


We had over 200 questions and comments roll in after I introduced Hemant Mehta, aka “the friendly atheist,” and invited you to ask him your pressing questions. It was tough picking the best ones—(we relied heavily on the “like” feature and questions that appeared to overlap with one another)—but I think these represent a good start to a healthy dialog.

Hemant is the author of I Sold My Soul on eBay. His blog, FriendlyAtheist.com, was the winner of the 2011 Bloggie Award for Best Weblog About Religion. (You can learn more about Hemant here.)

RHE: Thanks for taking the time to participate in this discussion, Hemant! It seems to have attracted quite a bit of interest. So, by way of background, what brought you to become an atheist, and what keeps you as an atheist? (question from Melissa)

HM: I became an atheist (someone who doesn't believe in a god) because I started questioning my parent's faith (Jainism) at 14 and I discovered that there was no proof for a lot of what they believed -- no proof for reincarnation, the existence of karma, heaven or hell, etc. There was really no evidence that anything supernatural ever occurred, period. Turns out that didn't just apply to Jainism -- every major religion believes in something supernatural. So I started calling myself an atheist.

What keeps me an atheist? Continued lack of evidence for the supernatural. Whenever Christians want to convince me god exists, they cite some personal anecdote… as if your cancer went away because God Did It (and not a doctor)… or you met your significant other because of God's Guiding Hand (and not via match.com or through mutual friends or pure coincidence). 

In my experience, Christians tend to be very bad at explaining their reasons for why god exists (and specifically the Christian version of god) in a way that any atheist can take seriously. Usually, we can respond with a perfectly natural explanation for your "miracle." Or, sometimes, I hear a Christian offer their explanation, and I wonder how they would feel if someone from a different faith said the exact same thing. Are they wrong?

What is the biggest misconception that Christians have about atheists? (question from Josh)

The biggest one that comes to my mind: Atheists are immoral because they don't believe in a god.

That's absurd. On the whole, we are highly ethical. The atheists I know donate to charity, volunteer their time, donate their blood, help other people, etc. Why be good? Because it makes the world a better, happier place to live in. Wouldn't you want to live in a world where people were helping each other instead of hurting them?

So why do people believe the opposite? I think a lot of pastors love to demonize atheists because they want you to believe that to be good, you need God… and since atheists don't have god, we can't *possibly* be good. It's just bad reasoning all around.

To paraphrase something I've heard before, if your belief in god is the only reason you're not killing, robbing, or raping others, then maybe you need to see a psychiatrist… (For what it's worth, I'm aware there are good and bad atheists just as there are good and bad Christians.)

What's the single question that you pose that people of faith have the hardest time answering to your satisfaction? And what single question do atheists in general have the most difficult time addressing? (question from Torcon1)

The hardest question for people of faith to answer: Why are all the other religions wrong? To me, they all believe in the same type of nonsense, so the same evidence that you might use to dismiss another faith can probably be used to dismiss your own. (And in case you're thinking "the Bible proves Christianity is true," I assure you all the other faiths think their holy book proves their religion is true, too.)

The hardest question for atheists to answer: You know, I thought about this for a while, and I really can't come up with anything. It's not that atheists know everything; it's just that we're perfectly comfortable saying "We don't know" to questions that no one has the answer to. Why do we exist at all? I don't know. What caused the Big Bang? I don't know. Why do we have consciousness? I don't know. I don't know those things and you don't either.

In my experience, most religious people can't handle that uncertainty. Their religions make up answers to those questions (and others like them) on the basis of no evidence whatsoever and people start believing it after a while. It'd be much more honest of them to admit no one has the answers to those questions and it's possible no one ever will.

What are ways that religion (Christianity specifically, since most readers here come from that faith tradition) crosses over from being something that you simply disagree with to something that you find harmful? (Question from Alise)

Religion is at its worst when people use their beliefs to deny other people equal rights, treat them in some awful way, or cast doubt on otherwise solid ideas.

Because of Christians, there are still laws in several states (though they're unconstitutional) that deny atheists from holding elected office. Because of Christians, in most states, my gay friends in committed relationships can't get married, adopt children, or put their significant other on their insurance plans. Because of Christians, we've become a nation full of evolution-deniers and science-doubters.

Of course, there are individual Christians who don't fall into each of these categories. But the institutional as a whole has done a hell of a lot of damage.

It's not just these "worst case" scenarios, though. Even "good Christians" on the side of proper science education and social justice believe in the supernatural. They believe someone is listening to their prayers and that Jesus rose from the dead, despite there being no evidence for either of those things (no matter what Lee Strobel tells you). Atheists believe in discovering the truth whenever possible, and anything that gets away from that is harmful to some extent.

A lot of folks wanted to know your response to Pascal’s Wager… Has this factored into your thinking at all?

Pascal's Wager essentially says: If you believe in God, you're safe whether he exists or not. If you don't believe in God, you're screwed if he exists. So why not just believe in God and save yourself from possible misery?

Frankly, I'm shocked so many Christians still use this argument. But here are a couple responses…

-- What if we're believing in the wrong God? Then we're all in trouble.

-- Do you really want me to say I believe in your god just to "hedge my bet"… or because I firmly believe your god exists?

Pascal's Wager ends up just asking for lip service, not genuine belief in a god.

On a side note: To everyone who asked about Pascal's Wager, you could've answered your own question by Googling "Pascal's Wager," going to the first link (Wikipedia), and reading the article :) That's the case with a lot of Christian "arguments for god." I wonder why so many Christians don't check with Google first. Or are they the same people who forward those annoying emails without checking Snopes.com first…?

Do you experience discrimination as an atheist? (Question from Jessica)

Yes, but it's not always "in the books."

Most atheists couldn't run for elected office because there's a taboo against people who don't have the "right" religious faith. (The fact that Mitt Romney is the current Republican frontrunner just proves that you don't even need to be a Protestant -- you just have to have faith, period.) Atheists are also the most distrusted religious minority in America as well as the people you'd least like your children to marry. So we're up against all those awful stereotypes.

More specifically, though, I remember applying for my first high school teaching job. Most of my leadership experience to that point had been with atheist organizations. I'd received a number of scholarships because of my activism, started my own successful atheist group on campus, helped run a non-profit group to help college atheists, written a book about atheism… and I had to purge all that from my resume because there was a strong likelihood those things would count against me.

I have no doubt, though, that if my resume said I volunteered with my local church, ran a church youth group, and received scholarships from national evangelical groups, it would've been a boost for me and made me look like a great candidate.

That's the sort of de facto discrimination atheists have to deal with all the time, and it's primarily due to religious leaders spreading misinformation about us. I'm trying to do what I can to reverse that damage.

Several people wanted to know what evidence or experience (if any) would cause you to believe in God?

At this point, I'd have to experience a miracle that had no natural explanation (and couldn't possibly have one). A real miracle, too, not "God opened up this parking spot for me; it's a miracle!" Sometimes, I'll hear about how doctors couldn't cure someone's disease but it "miraculously" went away… and it never takes into account that there could have been a misdiagnosis in the first place or that your body healed in a way we just haven't figured out yet. That's not evidence of god. Give me something irrefutable.

Or maybe god just needs to talk to me. God loooooooves talking to people who are already Christians, but he apparently hates talking to atheists :) I'm always listening. I always hear nothing.

From Liz: Do you say the Pledge of Allegiance? ("one nation under God")

As a high school teacher at a public school, it's said over the intercom in my classroom every day. I never say it, but my students are free to do so.

(For what it's worth, I think it's silly concept to pledge allegiance to any country in the first place. I'm a proud American, but there are a lot of horrible things my country does that I'm not proud of and there may come a time when it makes sense not to pledge allegiance to it. Why should we blindly commit ourselves to supporting our country no matter what? I think that's a bad lesson to teach children.)

From Ben: Who are your favorite living atheist thinkers? Who are your favorite living Christian thinkers?

I like Daniel Dennett, because he demystifies religion from a sociological perspective. His book, Breaking the Spell, is one of my favorites -- he made a lot of arguments against religion I hadn't considered before. I like blogger PZ Myers because he's never afraid to tell you what he thinks, no matter how uncomfortable it might make you feel (e.g. To Catholics: A communion wafer is just a cracker, not Jesus. Get over it). For what it's worth, I don't always agree with him and I sometimes dislike the tone he uses, but I appreciate his dedication in going after religious wrongs and faulty uses of science.

My favorite Christian thinkers? This is tough, because the theologists and apologists never seem to say anything compelling or different. There are brilliant scientists who happen to be Christian, but it's their contributions to science that I'm interested in.

Honestly, the only Christians I read on a regular basis are bloggers/writers who are willing to challenge the orthodoxy, the ones who tell the church it's wrong when it comes to science, homosexuality, its treatment of women, etc. But even *they* tend to cloak everything in the veil of "doubt" out of fear of offending other Christians… so instead of saying "There's no evidence God actually speaks to anyone," they say "I have doubts about whether God is actually speaking to Christians." I really don't think they're all "questioning." I think they've already made up their minds, but they're afraid of saying as much. Why not just tell church leaders how arrogant and misguided and pigheaded and wrong they are (when it's warranted)? It's not just the public Christian figures who don't get well-deserved pushback, though -- how many Christians have told their own pastors they're wrong on a particular issue? I would guess the number is very low.

That's what I love about atheists. We're not afraid to call people out on their crap. We're not afraid to criticize other atheists (public figures and bloggers alike) when we think they're wrong, either. There's just a sense of honesty and accountability in our movement that I don't always see in the Christian world.

From Heidi: When you feel moved to give thanks for something, to whom (or what) do you address your thanks?

To the people who deserve it.

If I got better after a surgery, I would thank the doctors. If I did well in a class, I would thank the teacher… or maybe pat myself on the back for studying so hard.

From April: What are you currently reading?

Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN. And a whole bunch of plays/scripts for the forensics/speech team I coach at my high school... (I read books/blogs about atheism all the time, so when I get a chance, it's nice to read things that are totally different.)

From Christine: What do you love most in life?

My friends. My family. My girlfriend. My job. My Speech Team kids. Reddit.

***

Note: Several atheists have jumped into the comment section to answer your questions from last week, so if you didn't see a response to your question here, check there. Or feel free to pose additional questions after this post.

Poverty Tourism, Poverty Elitism and Grace For All

http://rachelheldevans.com/poverty-tourism-poverty-elitism-grace

by Rachel Held Evans

posted July 6, 2011

When Matthew Paul Turner invited me to be part of World Vision’s Bolivia team this summer, the first thought that went through my mind was, Bolivia’s in South America, right? The second thought that went through my mind was, Why on earth would they need bloggers? What can we possibly do to help?

I was concerned because every blogger knows that posts about poverty, justice, and giving tend to result in notoriously low stats—not because people don’t care about poverty, but because it’s hard to say anything new or interesting about it. Furthermore, NGO-sponsored blog tours often produce posts that, as Kari mentioned in a comment last week, can be painfully predictable—you know, “the way that the bloggers are overwhelmed and then uplifted and then come home and, you know, can’t go to Wal-Mart without crying,” that sort of thing. I wasn’t sure I knew how to write about this trip in a creative way that would inspire readers to action.

“People don’t have opinions about poverty,” I told Dan, as I mulled over the trip. “A post about child sponsorship isn’t going to be followed by hundreds of comments and thousands of shares because no one’s going to argue against it. Opinion is the air that a blog breathes, and the only opinion people have about poverty is that it should be eliminated.”

Boy was I wrong about that.

Just a few weeks later, the blogosphere erupted into a heated debate, complete with thousands of comments and shares, about poverty. Well, not about poverty directly, but about how we, the “privileged,” should respond to it.

Poverty Tourism

It all started with an article in The Guardian that examined NGO-sponsored blogging trips from a somewhat critical perspective, questioning the effectiveness of writers “being flown to dirt-poor regions to solemnly observe the impoverished in their natural habitats before returning home with an interesting infection and an exalted sense of enlightenment.” The reporter labeled such trips “poverty tourism” and specifically mentioned a recent trip taken by Heather Armstrong, a wildly popular blogger who travelled to Bangladesh with Every Mother Counts, an organization that addresses maternal mortality.

Well this did not go over well with Heather Armstrong, who took to her blog and twitter account to defend her trip. Her post was followed by hundreds more, from bloggers and aid workers and missionaries alike, including some of our favorites—Nish Weiseth, Elizabeth Esther, Rage Against the Minivan, and Jamie The Very Worst Missionary.

I am thankful for the Guardian piece and for the debate that followed it because I believe that poverty tourism is indeed a problem. Churches are notorious for perpetrating it, usually with expensive weeklong missions trips that often inconvenience indigenous missionaries more than help them. We’ve all known…(or perhaps been)… the high school kid who returns from a week in South America with a camera full of photos, a suitcase full of souvenirs, and a heart full of “first-world guilt.”

In these scenarios, the countries visited are presented as one-dimensionally impoverished, its citizens cast as helpless innocents, and middle-class Americans portrayed as the only saviors who can help.

What I liked about the Guardian article was that it included some practical solutions for how bloggers can avoid poverty tourism. This, along with additional resources available to churches and individuals alike, can help those who find themselves experiencing poverty for the first time do so in a way that honors the people and places they encounter.

The truth of the matter is, many long-term missionaries, aid workers, and world-changers were inspired by short trips that changed their perspective forever. The right response to poverty tourism is to educate and reform, not to discourage people from experiencing poverty and reporting on what they learn.

Poverty Elitism

On other side of the coin we have another phenomenon that is just as destructive as poverty tourism. I call it poverty elitism, and it showed up more than a few times in the tone of the Guardian piece and in subsequent blog posts and comments on this topic.

All you need to become a poverty elitist is a little more experience with poverty than the people in your immediate vicinity. So, if you’ve spent six months in an orphanage in Romania and your friend has spent one week painting walls in Thailand, you can take advantage of that and wax eloquent on your poverty expertise while mocking your friend’s pathetic attempt at social justice via “tweets from Thailand.” But if someone in the room has spent 10 years working in refugee camps in Sudan, well then that person trumps you both. If he is a poverty elitist, he will promptly bemoan your pathetic foray into poverty tourism, causally reference all the times he had to carry water for three miles like the women of Darfur, and top it all off with a dismissive comment about Bono.

Poverty elitism is just as exploitive as poverty tourism, for it turns the poor into feathers in our caps and once again presents them as the helpless victims of well-meaning do-gooders.

My concern with poverty elitism is that if we belittle people for caring about poverty, if we make them feel small when they attempt to do something about it (albeit clumsily at times), then there’s a chance they will stop. If we’re serious about ending extreme poverty for good, then this is an all-hands-on-deck situation in which we can’t afford to be snobs. Yes, there will be poverty tourist. Yes, there will tacky t-shrits. Yes, there will be celebrities. Yes, there will be tweets. But this is one scenario in which we cannot allow the “I-thought-it-was-cool-before-everyone-else-thought-it-was cool” phenomenon to get the better of us.

Let’s face it. None of us who have the time and the resources to argue about this online truly understand what it’s like to suffer extreme poverty.

This is not to say that all opinions are equal. It’s important that we learn from those who have extensive experience dealing with government and non-government agencies, and it is absolutely vital that we learn from those who are actually facing the challenges of poverty themselves. The right response to poverty elitism is not to turn around and dismiss those with valuable experience, but rather to cut one another a little slack as we try and figure this out together.

Grace

So I decided to go to Bolivia. I decided to go because I was asked by a reputable organization, because the people at World Vision seem to think I can help, and because I’ll be able to work stories from my trip into my next book. I don’t feel a need to defend that decision any further.

As I consider how to proceed, I am fortunate to have as inspiration my sister, Amanda.

Amanda went on two-week trip to India when she was in college. She went with a group from school, the sort of trip that some might label “poverty tourism." But Amanda really connected with the people and the organizations there, and so she returned a few years later for a six-month stay….and then returned again for two subsequent visits. It seems that the friends she made among the indigenous missionaries and the poor they serve simply can’t get enough of her. They love her like a daughter, beg her to return, even called her on her wedding day.

When I visited Amanda in Hyderabad back in 2006, I had my “poverty tourist” moments—being shocked by the slums, throwing up all the time, taking an absurd amount of photographs, crying like a baby when the rickshaw driver ripped us off—but Amanda never looked down her nose at me or chided my efforts, even though a few weeks before she had held a dying little girl in her arms and a few weeks later she would severely burn her leg on a motorbike.

Amanda could have one-upped me. The missionaries could have one-upped Amanda. And the leprosy patients could have one-upped us all. But that never happened. Instead there was a sense that we shared a common brokenness and a common grace, and that there is no place for judgment or pity among friends.

What I love about the ministry of Jesus is that he identified the poor as blessed and the rich as needy… and then he went and ministered to them both. Poverty tourists need only look to the beatitudes (Luke 6:20-26) to be reminded that the poor are not one-dimensional victims in need of our help. Poverty elitists need only look to the story of the expensive perfume (Mathew 26:6-13) to be reminded that our Lord is more impressed with genuine love than effectiveness.

We cannot buy the lie that there are those who need and those who supply when the frightening and beautiful reality is that we desperately need one another.

That’s what I love about the Kingdom:

For the poor, there is food.

For the rich, there is joy.

For all of us, there is grace.

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So what's your take on this whole "poverty tourism" debate?

Have ever been a poverty tourist or a poverty elitist?