Church and State in San Diego

Draconian officials in San Diego seek to prohibit religious freedom.

FOX names Pr. and Mrs. David Jones as the victims of County misconduct, told they couldn’t have a Bible study in their home.

UPDATE: San Diego County backs down.

Theologians Address ELCA

An Open Letter to the Voting Members of the 2009 ELCA Churchwide Assembly.

“Leap of Faith”

Film about Christian converts to Judaism.

Papal Silence on the Notre Dame Matter

Time reports.

The Soldiers of Today

Photo.

“Utter Silliness”

The New York Times on “Angels and Demons.

“The only people likely to be offended by “Angels & Demons” are those who persist in their adherence to the fading dogma that popular entertainment should earn its acclaim through excellence and originality.

A New Call

After two years as Associate Pastor of the Houston International Seventh-day Adventist Church, a time meant to allow me to reacclimate to the church of my youth, I’ve been called to a new assignment. Starting next month, I’ll be pastor of the North Houston and Spring Creek Seventh-day Adventist churches. We won’t be moving–I’ll just have a 45 minute commute again like I did for my first nine years in Houston. This is a bigger move for my wife and kids, as they’ve been attending Houston International for eleven years now, our entire time in Houston.

David Gibson on “Angels & Demons”

Gibson’s review.

James White on Winning a War

Well this is amazing. James White apparently thinks the way to win a war is to have soldiers, carrying weapons, give out Bibles in a Muslim country.

Al Jazeera on Military Chaplains

Al Jazeera has aired a report on alleged proselytism by American soldiers, and alleged inappropriate conduct by chaplains. It includes extracts from a documentary, The Word and the Warriors, by Brian Hughes. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation is making a big deal of it, saying it “proves proselytization rampant at U.S. military bases.”

The film shows a discussion at a Protestant Bible study about the appropriateness of handing out Bibles in native languages. These are soldiers who, as Christians, want to witness. They realize they cannot do mass distributions of Bibles through their units, but they believe they can, as individuals, give Bibles as gifts to individuals they come in contact with. And the chaplain leading the group tells them their best witness is how they conduct themselves. But even if what they are doing is legal, it is very risky, and not at all prudent in a Muslim country. The chaplain would do better, I think, to advise them not to distribute any religious literature while in uniform.

In another scene, Ch (LTC) Gary Hensley is shown preaching.

“The special forces guys – they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down,” he says.

“Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That’s what we do, that’s our business.”

The context is important. He’s an evangelical chaplain, and here he is speaking at an evangelical chapel service. Chaplains represent both the military and their denomination. They must ensure that all religious needs are met, and advise the commander on issues of morals, morale, and ethics, but they also are to ensure that the religious needs of the members of their faith are met. Thus, chaplains are permitted to have services for members of their own faith; Protestant chaplains cooperate with one another for general Protestant services as well. In denomination specific services, chaplains are free to speak freely as members of that denomination (or as Protestants in the Protestant service). Here, Ch. Hensley preaches to fellow evangelicals about the Christian call to evangelize. “As Christians,” he says, “we hunt people for Jesus. …That’s what we do, that’s our business.” He has as much right to say that in a Protestant chapel service as he would in his own church back home (just as a Catholic chaplain is free to tell people to go to confession, etc.).

Methodists and Mickey D.

$13,699 A Day: What the UMC Could Learn From McDonald’s.

Willimon on Seminaries

Willimon writes:

Seminaries, at least those in our church, labor under a growing disconnect between the graduates they are producing and the leadership needs of the churches these graduates are serving. This disjunction causes friction in and sometimes defeat of the transition between seminary and church for new pastors. For example, most protestant seminaries have organized themselves on the basis of modern, Western ways of knowing. The epistemology that still holds theological education captive is that which was borrowed from the modern university – detached objectively, the fact/value dichotomy, the separation of emotion and reason with the exaltation of reason as the superior means of knowing, the sovereignty of subjectivity, the loss of any authority other than the isolated, sovereign self pared with subservience to the social, cultural, and political needs of the modern nation state. (The best history of what happened in our seminaries in the Twentieth Century is by Conrad Cherry, Hurrying Toward Zion: Universities, Divinity Schools and American Protestantism, Indiana University Press, 1995.)

That’s saying a mouthful but it is an attempt to depict the intellectual “world” of the theological school that has a tough time honoring the intellectual restrictions of academia and the peculiarly sweeping mandate of the church of Jesus Christ.

The word “seminary” means literally “seed bed.” Seminary was meant to be the nursery where budding theologians are cultivated and seeds are planted that will bear good fruit, God willing, in the future. Trouble is, seminaries thought they could simply overlay those governmentally patronized, culturally confirmed ways of academic thinking over the church’s ways of thought, and proceed right along as if nothing had happened between the seminary as the church created it to be (a place to equip and form new pastoral leaders for the church) and the seminary as it became (another graduate/professional school).

In the world of the contemporary theological school, faculty talk mostly to one another (As Nietzsche noted, long ago, no one reads theologians except for other theologians.), faculty accredit and tenure other faculty using criteria derived mainly from the modern, secular research university. While the seminary desperately needs faculty who are adept at negotiating the tension between ecclesia and academia, faculty tend to be best at bedding down in academia. The AAR (American Academy of Religion) owns theological education.

One last disconnect I’ll mention: The seminary, by its nature, is a selective, elitist institution, selecting and evaluating its students with criteria that are derived from educational institutions rather than the ecclesia. In one sense, a theological school should be selective, astutely selecting these students who can most benefit Christ’s future work with the church. Trouble is, when criteria are applied that arise from sources other than the Body of Christ, we have the phenomenon of the church’s leadership schools cranking out people who have little interest in equipment for service to the church as it is called to be. If college departments of Religious Studies were not in decline, there would be something to do with the best of these seminary graduates. If the U S Post Office were not holding its employees more accountable for their performance, the rest of them would have promising careers.

Willimon on Borg

William Willimon writes:

I recently heard Marcus Borg of the errant “Jesus Seminar” chide us pastors for protecting our congregations from the glorious fruits of “contemporary biblical scholarship.” There’s a brave new world of insight through the historical-critical study of Scripture! Don’t hold back from giving the people in the pew the real truth about Jesus as it has been uncovered by contemporary biblical scholarship and faithfully delivered to you in seminary biblical courses. He implied that even the laity, in their intellectual limitations, can take the truth about Jesus as revealed by Professor Borg and his academic friends.

Yet it seemed not to occur to professor Borg that contemporary biblical scholarship, because it is asking the wrong questions of the biblical texts, and even more because it is subservient to a community that is at odds with communities of faith, may simply be irrelevant both to the church and to the intent of the church’s Scripture. Sometimes the dissonance between the church and the academy is due, not to the benighted nature of the church, but rather to the limited thought that reigns in the academy.

Chaplain Watters

Article.

The Pope at Yad Vashem

Pope’s speech. Reaction. The problem: German pope who was 18 when WW2 ended says nothing about Germany having done it, or about the German Catholics who helped make it happen, or about the legacy of Catholic antisemitism that made it possible.

The Puritans and Sex

CNA carries a story about Catholic author Christopher West’s “Theology of the Body,” and conservative Catholic opposition to him.

Unfortunately, both West and his critics engage in misguided and erroneous bashing of Puritans, accusing them of being against sex and against the body.

But hold on there. Did the Puritans demand that their clergy be celibate? Did the Puritans establish monasteries and convents, viewing “virginity” as a more spiritual state than matrimony? Did the Puritans give us fasting during Lent and abstinence from meat on Fridays? No.

Want the truth on Puritans and sex? Start with this article.

Ave Maria, FL: A Town Without a Vote

Special series in the Naples Daily News looks at the governmental structure of Ave Maria, FL. It seems Tom Monaghan got the legislature to pass a special law disenfranchising the residents of his holy city.

The law gives Monaghan and Barron Collier Cos. more power than any Florida developer in at least 24 years, power perhaps not seen since the days of the early 20th century land boom. The law makes landowners, not registered voters, the ultimate authority in Ave Maria. The law ensures Monaghan and Barron Collier Cos., as the largest landowners, can control Ave Maria’s government forever.

RIP, Carl Towley

I was surprised to hear that an old friend and mentor, Carl Towley, died in January. He was my CPE supervisor at Walter Reed.

Angels & Demons and Pseudo-History

Andrew Leigh writes.

Torture, Inc.

ABC reports that the CIA hired two psychologists as consultants to help them devise torture techniques–but they had no prior experience in interrogation.

Dalai Lama @ Harvard

Boston Globe.