Heavensgate

David Mason commits clarity on the relationship between the LDS and orthodox Christianity:

I want to be on record about this. I’m about as genuine a Mormon as you’ll find — a templegoer with a Utah pedigree and an administrative position in a congregation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I am also emphatically not a Christian.

For the curious, the dispute can be reduced to Jesus. Mormons assert that because they believe Jesus is divine, they are Christians by default. Christians respond that because Mormons don’t believe — in accordance with the Nicene Creed promulgated in the fourth century — that Jesus is also the Father and the Holy Spirit, the Jesus that Mormons have in mind is someone else altogether. The Mormon reaction is incredulity. The Christian retort is exasperation. Rinse and repeat.

Leaving aside Mason's sloppiness about the nature of the Holy Trinity (in my Trinity Sunday sermon, I doubt I did much better), his point is akin to the question of whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Look at the Quran, and you might say the answer is yes, since Allah is described as the God of Abraham and the great prophet Jesus. Ask an orthodox Christian, and she might say no, since the Islamic God isn't the father of a risen savior whose sacrifice of himself once offered is sufficient for all the world's salvation and liberation and who shares indissolubly in God's nature (they are consubstantial, as Benedict XVI now insists that Roman Catholics say in the Nicene Creed). Islam has long since proclaimed its own conception of the Godhead and its teachings, completely separate from Jewish or Christian worship and practice, and Mormons, in their bid to be the fourth Abrahamic faith, are heading in the same direction.

Insisting they were just another Christian denomination helped protect Mormons from suspicion and persecution. Let's hope that motive for theological obfuscation is now inoperative. Permission to speak freely? Christians have an issue with many, or most -- heck, all -- of the claims in the Book of Mormon. And yet the revelation to Joseph Smith, on whom all depends for the LDS, is no more unsettling for the modern mind than the revelation to Muhammad or Jesus's bodily resurrection and ascent into heaven where he sitteth on the right hand of God the father, judging the quick and the dead.

Saying my miracle is real and yours a fable or fraud pretty much sums up interfaith dialog unless we look beyond insuperable doctrinal debates and decide that all people of faith will be judged not by what they believe but how they behave. But that's a difficult step in itself for those who've been taught that their salvation is absolutely contingent on belief. I can do it either if my belief is leavened by profound humility and just a bit of common sense (why did God put all those people in western China without any Episcopal churches?) or if I actually don't take my orthodoxy seriously -- if I'm an OINO (you figure it out!). The interfaith dilemma amounts to the struggle for real community among serious believers who locate in their doctrines, and hear echoing in their hearts, God's eternal summons to the faithful to promote wholeness for all God's creatures, both individually (each created being's divine right to be healed and whole) and corporately.

Steeped in our founding, Enlightenment virtues, Americans are well-positioned to learn and practice religious tolerance in our civic life, though it hasn't always been easy. For centuries, there had been no more deadly quarrel than between Roman Catholics and Protestants. It persists in churches and seminaries, but Richard Nixon finally wrote it out of our politics in 1960.

The dynamics are more complicated this year. People have been called bigots for agreeing with David Mason that Mormons, including Mitt Romney, aren't really Christians. That's because Romney's supporters feared the charge would hurt him with evangelicals. Some of the same evangelicals think Barack Obama, who came up in the mainline UCC, isn't a Christian, either. St. Santorum added a whiff of that ugliness to the GOP primaries. His ilk would probably erase my little denomination from the book of life as well. Remember, the Reformation ain't over till it's over. Do a Google on "antichrist," and see how many pictures of Obama and Benedict you get. For some conservative people of faith, and not as few as you may think, this is the first election in U.S. history in which neither man who wants to spend the next four years in the White House has a snowball's chance of spending eternity in heaven.

Hat tip to Paul Matulic

From Emergent To Empire Blue Shield

Diana Butler Bass sees the troubles in the Anglican Communion not in terms of right vs. left as much as grassroots vs. elites:

For centuries, faith was top-down: Spiritual power flowed from pope to the faithful, archbishop to Anglicans, priest to the pious, pastor to congregation. This has changed as regular people confidently assert that spirituality is a grassroots adventure of seeking God, a journey of insight and inspiration involving authenticity and purpose that might or might not happen in a church, synagogue or mosque. Spirituality is an expression of bottom-up faith and does not always fit into accepted patterns of theology or practice. Fearing this change, however, many religious bodies, such as the Anglican Communion, increasingly fixate on order and control, leading them to reassert hierarchical authority and be less responsive to the longings of those they supposedly serve. And that will push religion further into its spiral of irrelevance and decline.

The New Testament and early non-canonical writings are fraught with a comparable tension between the orthodox church and its failed rivals. Experts think that among the Gnostics' alleged heresies was their idea that God's salvation was as near as one's own faithful heart. Who needs a church for that? The Reformation also grasped from the grassroots, as does today's emergent Christianity. Bass doesn't call for the church's de-professionalization, but our doctrines do. We proclaim that all the baptized are called to priesthood and equality and mutuality in the body of Christ. My ordained sistren and brethren and I are theoretically temporary, like socialism on the way to communism and wilderness on the way to the promised land -- though Elaine Pagels, an authority on Gnosticism, does note that without the institutional church, Christianity probably wouldn't have survived Christ by more than a few generations.

As through the brass darkly, we can glimpse a more democratic church. Near the end of our Good Friday service at St John's, two lads in sneakers walked into the middle of our solemn liturgy carrying a rough, splintery cross and planted it in front of the altar. We ministers took off our vestments and clergy collars, tossed it all in a heap, and invited everyone to join us at Golgotha. Come inside the altar rails, we urged them. Come claim the place at the foot of the cross that belongs to you, for good and for shame. "No need to wait in line. Just crowd up here. It's not an altar anymore," I said. "It's just wood that's been nailed and glued together." We rearranged the ministers' chairs in a circle and stacked our prayer books and hymnals on the bare table. Some sat on chairs or the floor; others stood, just as people did one afternoon while watching Jesus suffer. Huddled within the sanctuary, we 60 witnesses put our arms around each other, said a few more prayers, ate up what was left of the consecrated sacrament, and went home.

Like most spiritual leaders, a priest wears a special outfit and game face and carefully observes liturgical forms. For a few moments on Good Friday, I felt the peace of being a companion and fellow witness. Since then, it's been back to the work of the ordained and professionalized in the complex institutions our churches and schools have become -- board meetings, worship planning, preaching and teaching, visiting and comforting the afflicted, budgets, phone calls and e-mails, mass communications, diocesan work, and never-ending due diligence. Might God and we evolve spiritual communities where all responsibilities and competencies are shared by volunteers? The professional pastor is called to mediate the empowerment of the laity to the full extent of their gifting. It would be harder to do without us entirely (though the LDS, with its non-stipendiary ministries, may be a model). Even at new, emergent communities, hierarchy will be an inevitable temptation. A moment must always come when a devoted volunteer finds she's spending so much time on the grassroots adventure of Christianity that she asks if at some point she might get dental.

Tide Of Information=Tide Of History

From the Christmas double issue of "The Economist," a fascinating article about 16th century social media and the success of the Reformation:

In the early years of the Reformation expressing support for [Martin] Luther’s views, through preaching, recommending a pamphlet or singing a news ballad directed at the pope, was dangerous. By stamping out isolated outbreaks of opposition swiftly, autocratic regimes discourage their opponents from speaking out and linking up. A collective-action problem thus arises when people are dissatisfied, but are unsure how widely their dissatisfaction is shared, as Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, has observed in connection with the Arab spring. The dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia, she argues, survived for as long as they did because although many people deeply disliked those regimes, they could not be sure others felt the same way. Amid the outbreaks of unrest in early 2011, however, social-media websites enabled lots of people to signal their preferences en masse to their peers very quickly, in an “informational cascade” that created momentum for further action.

The same thing happened in the Reformation. The surge in the popularity of pamphlets in 1523-24, the vast majority of them in favour of reform, served as a collective signalling mechanism. As Andrew Pettegree, an expert on the Reformation at St Andrew’s University, puts it in “Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion”, “It was the superabundance, the cascade of titles, that created the impression of an overwhelming tide, an unstoppable movement of opinion…Pamphlets and their purchasers had together created the impression of irresistible force.” Although Luther had been declared a heretic in 1521, and owning or reading his works was banned by the church, the extent of local political and popular support for Luther meant he escaped execution and the Reformation became established in much of Germany.

How The West Lures Palestine's Christians Away

Less than a century ago, Khaled Diab writes, 10% of Palestine's population was Christian. Today, the Christian population is four percent in the West Bank, 2.5% in Israel, and one percent in Gaza. Diab says they're leaving not because of persecution but as the result of the Israel-Palestinian conflict and also because, according to one of the authorities he quotes, Christian faith often trumps national identity. Their Western partners and friends are evidently playing a role:

“I think that an awful lot of well-meaning Christians in the West, whether they are in America, Britain or other places, have poured a lot of money into the West Bank, and specifically into the churches and ministries here,” observes Richard Meryon, director of Jerusalem’s Garden Tomb, which is locked in a spiritual/territorial dispute with the nearby Church of the Holy Sepulchre over the exact location of the crucifixion, burial and resurrection of Jesus.

This outside aid, he notes, “is causing a hemorrhaging of Palestinian believers,” because many are given assistance to move to the West to study but, once there, decide never to return.

As for the validity of the Garden Tomb's claims, which date from the 19th century, check here and draw your own conclusions. The preponderance of modern scholarship favors the Church of the Holy Sepulcher (photo above by Kathy O'Connor). During our St. John's pilgrimages we've found that evangelical Christian groups tend to favor the Garden Tomb. The ancient, ornate Holy Sepulcher, where monks chant and incense billows, is run by the Roman Catholic and five orthodox churches. The Reformation ain't over till it's over.

Feeling That Easter Discomfort

Charles Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby contains an insight into theological sophistry with which the Church has grappled virtually since the days of Jesus's earthly life. Near the end of the epic story of the novel's brash, heroic namesake, a dissolute character named Walter Bray is on the verge of selling his daughter, Madeline, into marriage. When the wedding day comes, Walter says to his co-conspirator, Nicholas' uncle, that it seems like a cruel thing to do. Dickens observes:

When men are about to commit, or to sanction the commission of some injustice, it is not uncommon for them to express pity for the object either of that or some parallel proceeding, and to feel themselves, at the time, quite virtuous and moral, and immensely superior to those who express no pity at all. This is a kind of upholding of faith above works, and is very comfortable.

Dickens conveyed his surgically precise grasp of human venality and vanity in characterizations that were often harsh but sometimes deeply affecting. I especially love Nicholas' narcissistic if harmless mother. In chapter 55, as she begins one of her exasperating, self-celebratory flights of free association, her son tries to keep reading his book. Finally, Dickens writes, "Nicholas snuffed the candles, put his hands in his pockets, and leaning back in his chair, assumed a look of patient suffering and melancholy resignation." Dickens was more astringent about misdeeds such as Madeline's greedy father's, especially if they were laced with pretensions of compassion.

Dickens' grace note about faith and works was an echo of Reformation struggles by Protestants against medieval Roman Catholic doctrines that seemed to teach that we could earn and buy our way into heaven. The author of of the New Testament letter of James proclaimed that faith in God without good deeds and works was dead [2:26].

As James and St. Paul (in Romans 6:1) both make clear, even in Jesus's time some had concluded they could do whatever they wanted as long as they had faith that they'd be forgiven, once they repented, at long last. For centuries, Reformation ideals propelled some Christians into lives of robust situational ethics. Even today, whenever we're tempted to compromise, neglect, mistreat, lash out, oppress, or isolate, we're been called to live Easter lives instead. But it's not always easy. Thinking we're justified in ungodly or unkind action or inaction is, as Dickens would say, very comfortable indeed.

+Will.I.Ams Really Conflicted

Opportunistically and entrepreneurially, the Pope is reaching into the heart of the English Reformation -- a kind of ecclesiastical Tet Offensive -- to steal shepherds and sheep who can't abide a woman in a miter. By joining an outfit called the English Ordinariate, laity, priests, and bishops will be allowed to continue to preserve elements of Anglican worship. The body-of-Christ count so far, according to the London Telegraph:

About 30 groups from across the country are believed to have registered an interest in joining the Ordinariate. This would mean an estimated 500-600 Anglicans, including about 50 priests, will be in the first wave of converts to join the Ordinariate when it is established in the first half of next year.

Just so you can fully appreciate the irony of the positions being taken by the Archbishop of Canterbury (shown here during a visit to the Church of the Messiah in Santa Ana in the summer of 2009), he's gently harrumphing as Benedict XVI moves on his right flank and yet simultaneously supporting efforts to relegate U.S. Episcopalians to the second table of the Anglican Communion because of their insistence on the sacramental equality of gays and lesbians. So it's yes on women but no on homosexuals? Poor Archbishop Rowan: It's never been tougher to be stuck in the middle.

Calling The Next Dick Morris

Eric Martin:

The Republican Party (with commendable exceptions such as Grover Norquist and Ted Olson - whose wife was killed on 9/11), aided by its major media apparatus, is actively and deliberately whipping up bigotry, hate and anger - pitting Americans against Americans - for little more than electoral gain.

Read Martin's whole post. His says demonizing Islam could weaken our national security by lending credence to Al-Qaeda's core argument, which is that the U.S. and west are at war with Islam.

Of course if we think the religion of Islam is already at war with the west, we're not going to worry about that. But I don't. I do understand the temptation to think so, because unless we spend some time studying Islamic thought, culture, and life, we'll be inclined to see most Muslims as pre-reform woman-oppressors and infidel-haters. Even the gentle and learned church history teacher from my seminary days says that most Muslims are by definition theological fundamentalists (by which he means that they're like Christians before the Reformation and Enlightenment, not that they're terrorists).

What we need, it's often said, are more Islamic moderates who embrace western political values and promote women's rights and true interfaith dialogue -- more people, for instance, just like the founders of the lower Manhattan mosque, whom Newt Gingrich has compared to Nazis. That kind of rhetoric is as low as it can be, as was Sen. Mitch McConnell's weaselly answer yesterday about the president's faith.

But Democrats won't staunch the bleeding in 2010 and win in 2012 by proclaiming that the right is exhibiting poor taste and a lack of scruples. The pickle the president's in is as much his fault as his critics', for two reasons. First, he remains surprisingly aloof to many Americans, which enables his critics to sow and exploit confusion about his motives and intentions. To know him better would be to trust him more.

Second, he should've kept mum on the lower Manhattan mosque and community center. To amplify its message going into the midterm elections that he's out of touch with the American people, the GOP had been looking for exactly what he gave them -- something sexier than the perils of regulating derivatives or extending insurance to 25-year-old college students. By speaking up for the mosque, he handed it to them on a prayer mat. Tempering his support a day or two later only made it worse.

Yes, being in favor of freedom of religious expression was the right thing to do. Except it wasn't, because he hurt himself and his party without doing the mosque planners any favors. GOP spinners are already stirring pernicious doubts about his religion and unpopular support for the mosque into their already potent cocktail about his unpopular and so far ineffective policies (remember 10.5% unemployment), ending up with a toxic and perhaps even dangerous brew, to be served up to swing voters everywhere, about a strange, foreign man with secret, malign purposes.

To get himself through the midterms and especially to help him govern afterward, Barack Obama must locate some more defensible terrain from which to govern. He must figure out how to love the great pragmatic American middle and to receive its support and even affection in return. One way or the other, he must find his Dick Morris. From now on, he needs "Nixon goes to China" rather than "Obama goes to Mecca" moments.

The Reformation Will Not Be Televised

You know what's harder to believe that not giving a mosque a building permit because you don't want Muslims worshiping near Ground Zero? Firing Roman Catholics and Episcopalians at an evangelical school because they're not the right kind of Christians.

The Shepherd Of Episcopalians

Before leaving this morning for one of my periodic lunches with church historian Charles Frazee, I jokingly wrote on Facebook that I expected a conversation about the Coptic church. While we went much further afield, as any conversation with Dr. Frazee must because of the astonishing extent of his interests and gifts, I did come away with a copy of his latest manuscript, An Historical Introduction to the Eastern Christian Churches, Copts, of course, included, exam, I pray, not.

My Facebook post prompted a half-dozen comments from fellow Episcopal priests who, like me, learned their church history from Charlie. "Yea, Dr. Frazee," said the Rev. Kay Sylvester. "He rocks." Wrote the Rev. Cn. Diane Jardine Bruce, "Give him my best...and tell him someone (not me!) lost all my 3x5 cards that I made from his classes!" When I passed these greetings along, Charlie's always cheerful face brightened a little more at the mention of each name. He even remembered Diane's copious index cards, photocopied and studied, thanks to her devout Christian pity, by a whole generation of M.Div. students at the Episcopal Theological School at Claremont, California.

Dr. Frazee, you see, didn't use a textbook. At the beginning of his two-semester course in late August, he's say, "The church of Christ was born the moment Mary Magdalene received the news of Jesus's Resurrection..." At the end of the last class in May, he'd say, "...and though Warren's church is Southern Baptist to the core, it takes pains to present a non-threatening, post-denominational face." In between we would have experienced 20 centuries of Christian history and practice -- the Gnostics, ecumenical councils, Crusades, Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, and perhaps 500 other topics. He would never have looked at a note, missed a name or date, grasped hesitantly for a word, or failed to utter a graceful, perfectly formed sentence.

If you had his class after lunch on Saturday, which I always did, students' energies might flag, but his never did. Each semester, he assigned four or five books and book reports -- The Rule of St. Benedict, The Imitation of Christ, that kind of thing. As for the core material, while he was always pleased to hear his often middle-aged students talk about the Holy Spirit or challenge him with their views on post-structural gender semiotics as applied to the gospel narratives, he said his job was making sure we future ministers knew when the First Letter of Clement had been written what Martin Luther's dates were. I lost five points on the fall 1998 final because I didn't remember the Shepherd of Hermas. Not that I'm licking old wounds.

Speaking of Br. Martin, I wouldn't say that Charlie spent a lot of time on the Reformation. He figured we'd get plenty in our Anglican history and theology classes. He also believes that the mother church would probably have managed to reform without the Protestant reformers. An inactive Catholic priest with a brilliant wife and two brilliant daughters, Charlie served in the Archdiocese of Indianapolis during the 1960s and early 1970s, earning the scorn of his bishop for helping lead protests against the Vietnam War. After he, Kathy, Sara, and Jill came to California, he taught at California State University, Fullerton and, of course, ETSC.

Though retired from both posts, he teaches and lectures frequently and writes incessantly. Some of his prior books are listed here. In September, he's leading a pilgrimage to Catholic Greece. Did you know there were 50,000 Roman Catholics in Greece? You do now, and watch out: It'll be on the test.