“In Greece and Syria, Pope John Paul II Tries to Heal Ancient Wounds”

But many Orthodox Christians and Muslims are suspicious and hostile to visit.

Despite major obstacles, Pope John Paul II has made history during his pilgrimage to Athens and Damascus, with a series of symbolic gestures and speeches which forge new links with both Orthodox Christians and Muslims.

On Sunday, May 6, in Damascus, Pope John Paul became the first pontiff to enter a mosque when he visited the Umayyad Mosque in the company of Mufti Ahmed Kuftaro of Syria. The Pope urged forgiveness between Christians and Muslims, but, out of deference to Muslim sensitivities, no formal prayer was said.

On Friday, May 4, John Paul made the first visit to Greece by a pope in 1291 years. In recent weeks, plans for his visit had been strongly criticized by Greek Orthodox clergy and laity, but in Athens Pope John Paul defused at least some of the hostility by asking God to forgive Roman Catholics for sins committed against Orthodox Christians over the past 1,000 years.

Pope John Paul, who will celebrate his 81st birthday on May 18, is following in the “steps of St Paul” as he visits Athens, Damascus and Malta on his six-day pilgrimage. He returns to Rome today.

The Pope was invited to visit Greece by the country’s president, Costis Stephanopoulos, and not by the Church of Greece, to which most of the country’s 10.6 million citizens belong. When John Paul arrived at Athens airport on May 4 he was welcomed by government officials, and by bishops from Greece’s Catholic minority—but no Orthodox bishop was there to greet him.

The Roman Catholic leader, accompanied by four cardinals, went immediately to the presidential residence in Athens and then made a “courtesy visit” to 61-year-old Archbishop Christodoulos of Athens and All Greece, head of the Church of Greece. Several leading metropolitans of the Greek church were present.

After a private meeting of 30 minutes, Pope John Paul and Archbishop Christodoulos spoke publicly. Speaking Greek, the Greek archbishop said the Pope’s visit “brings us joy. Our joy is, however, overshadowed by the fact of our division.”

Archbishop Christodoulos then referred to religious differences between the Orthodox and Roman Catholics, some of which date back more than 1,000 years. He mentioned in particular the crusaders’ sacking of Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire, in 1204, and a more recent source of tension between Greece and the Catholic Church, the Vatican’s failure to condemn the partition of Cyprus, following the Turkish invasion of 1974.

The archbishop also mentioned problems regarding Eastern Catholic churches—which celebrate Orthodox liturgy but are linked to Rome, and are viewed by many Orthodox as a Vatican ploy to entice Orthodox Christians into the Roman flock. The Vatican used to view the Eastern Catholic churches as a possible means to unite western and eastern Christianity, but in recent years, in face of the Orthodox hostility towards the policy, this view has been dropped.

Pope John Paul replied: “For the occasions past and present, when sons and daughters of the Catholic Church have sinned by action or omission against their Orthodox brothers and sisters, may the Lord grant us forgiveness. … I am thinking of the disastrous sack of the imperial city of Constantinople, which was for so long a bastion of Christianity in the East.”

The Pope said nothing about Cyprus, but indirectly referred to the Eastern Catholic issue, stating simply that “certain models of reunion of the past no longer correspond to the impulse towards unity which the Holy Spirit has awakened in Christians everywhere in recent times.”

On Friday afternoon, Pope John Paul and Archbishop Christodoulos met again, at a spot where St Paul preached about 1950 years ago, to sign a “common declaration.” Referring to the process of European unification, they agreed: “We shall do everything in our power, so that the Christian roots of Europe and its Christian soul may be preserved. … We condemn all recourse to violence, proselytism and fanaticism, in the name of religion.”

The two religious leaders then said the Lord’s Prayer together.

On Friday evening, the archbishop returned the courtesy visit to the Pope, whom he visited at that papal nuncio’s residence in Athens. On Saturday John Paul said mass for Greece’s Catholic community before leaving for Damascus.

The head of the (Catholic) Bishops’ Conference of Greece, Bishop Nikolaos Foscolos, told journalists: “We are very, very happy. We now hope to improve our dialogue with our Orthodox brothers and sisters, and also the legal position of the Catholic Church [which is not officially recognized by the Greek government].”

Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Persiterion, near Athens, told ENI: “There are two sides to the Pope’s visit. One is very positive—it’s the first time a bishop of Rome visits Athens, meets our archbishop, and signs with him a joint declaration condemning proselytism and fanaticism. All of that is very important, but there are also negative aspects.”

The metropolitan said that the Pope had made no concrete statements on the Eastern Catholic controversy, which was “now the main obstacle to official dialogue between the Orthodox as a whole and the Catholic Church.” And, Metropolitan Chrysostomos added, despite the request by Archbishop Christodoulos, Pope John Paul had not said a single word about Cyprus.

In Syria’s capital, Damascus, Pope John Paul made similar efforts to build bridges by reaching out to Muslims and their leaders. After exchanging gifts with Mufti Kuftaro—a picture of the Virgin Mary for the Islamic leader, a Koran for the Pope—John Paul said in a speech to dozens of Syrian Christian and Islamic leaders and scholars: “For all the times that Muslims and Christians have offended one another, we need to seek forgiveness.

“It is my ardent hope that Muslim and Christian religious leaders and teachers will present our two great religious communities as communities in respectful dialogue, never more as communities in conflict.”

The Pope’s visit to the mosque was clearly part of his plan to build deeper links and dialogue between the three monotheistic faiths—Judaism, Islam and Christianity. In 1986 John Paul became the first pontiff to visit a synagogue.

The Pope also celebrated mass for a congregation of 30,000 Christians in Damascus on Sunday. Unlike Greece, where so many Orthodox opposed John Paul’s pilgrimage, the minority Orthodox communities in Syria encouraged their members to attend the Sunday service, at which Orthodox leaders were also present.

Commenting on the Pope’s visits to Athens and Damascus, The Times of London stated: “Both form part of what is emerging as the 80-year-old Pope’s final goal in the twilight of his long papacy: to heal the divisions within Christianity through his drive for ecumenism, and simultaneously to achieve reconciliation between the world’s three main monotheistic religions.”

But the Observer newspaper, also published in London, pointed out that in Syria as in Greece, there was stiff opposition by some Muslims to the Pope’s visit.

“History teaches us that Western pilgrimages have covert political motives,” said Bouti, Syria’s leading Sunni preacher, one of several key Muslim conservatives who blocked the Vatican’s attempt to hold a common Christian-Muslim prayer in the Umayyad Mosque.

Sheikh al-Hout, of the Amara Mosque in Damascus, told the Observer: “Would the Pope let us give the Muslim call to prayer at St Peter’s [Basilica in Rome]?”

The Umayyad Mosque has at times been a Christian church and still houses what is believed to be the tomb of St John the Baptist, at which the Pope made a silent prayer on Sunday.

Some Muslim clerics suggested that the Vatican could in fact be preparing to revive ancient battles over such holy places shared by the two faiths.

Related Elsewhere

Yahoo’s Pope John Paul II full coverage area offers dozens of links to news stories about the visit.

The BBC also has many news links on the subject.

Mummy’s Day

“The Mummy Returns full of sound and fury and not much else. Also, vampires lurk in The Forsaken, and that legendary monster Infidelity rears its ugly head in Faithless.”

It sounds like a little punctuation would give The Mummy Returns a more appropriate title: “The Mummy” Returns. Mainstream and religious media critics alike are groaning at how much this sequel is just The Mummy all over again, only louder, longer, and even more ludicrous. The box office, however, shows that audiences are happily scarfing down the year’s first junk food blockbuster without questioning its ingredients or what might be missing. For those who want more information before proceeding, here are the responses of several mummy-gazers.

Christian critic Michael Elliot came out of The Mummy Returns unimpressed. “This is The Mummy slightly repackaged, definitely revisited,” the Movie Parables critic writes. “Watching it is a bit like having déjà vu because it sticks pretty close to the original formula.” He notes that the film is “high on action and CGI effects but quite low on originality.” Similarly, a critic for the U.S. Catholic Conference responds that this “overblown action flick is all non-stop physical confrontations and splashy special effects, with characterizations and narrative lost in all the sound and fury.”

Mainstream critics are using adjectives that action movies try to avoid … like boring. FilmCritic.com‘s Christopher Null shrugs at what he calls “a bunch of cheap fright gags, lame jokes, and boring traps, all of which we’ve seen countless times before. For much of the film I simply sat there feeling bored.” Boredom was the experience of Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert as well: “Imagine yourself on a roller coaster for two hours. After the first 10 minutes, the thrills subside. The mistake of The Mummy Returns is to abandon the characters, and to use the plot only as a clothesline for special effects and action sequences.”

Peter T. Chattaway calls some of the film’s animation effects “downright sloppy,” and in his Vancouver Courier review he adds, “The acting is all over the map … from [Brendan] Fraser’s reliable straight-man routine to Patricia Velasquez’s clumsy performance as Imhotep’s reincarnated lover.” Another unfortunate characteristic of the movie, according to Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly—this mummy just isn’t scary. “There’s not one minute,” she insists, “not one, when we need ever fear for the O’Connells, because we know all along that the monsters are made of pixels and, in the age of sequels, families populated by stars are always safe. Nor is there one minute when the mummies are awesome—like in the original 1932 Mummy—because we know all along that they no longer represent figments of our unconscious but instead represent the latest advances in CGI technology.”

Looking closer at the film’s dabblings in ancient Egyptian mythology and spirituality, some critics found a laughably self-contradicting mish-mash of ideas. At Christian Spotlight on the Movies, Kenneth R. Morefield noticed that when the movie’s various and wicked spiritual forces lead to inevitable trouble, one character mutters “God help us.” Morefield also noticed a scene in which a hero fights to escape being dragged by a demon down to the underworld; yet, when a child’s dead mother is brought back from the dead, she offers to explain “what heaven looks like.” Is there, then, a heaven in this world? If so, it must select its inhabitants at random. “None of this is intentionally heretical or even thought out,” Morefield writes. “And I say it not because being unchristian in its worldview makes it a bad movie, but because being inconsistent in the world it recreates (Christian or non-Christian) is an element of an inferior fantasy world.”

Bob Smithouser at Focus on the Family argues that this installment is “equally violent and more spiritually bankrupt than the original. It’s a headache-inducing, visceral barrage that seems determined to keep audiences from pausing long enough to realize how ridiculous it all is.” Smithouser mocks the film’s “maddening” theology, which pits one evil “god” against another. “Who’s left to root for when it’s darkness vs. darkness?” he asks.

Other religious critics either overlooked or ignored these flaws. Critics at Movieguide and Preview both object to The Mummy Returns only because it presents elements of the occult and reincarnation rather than Christianity. Holly McClure at The Dove Foundation may be the only religious media critic who seemed perfectly happy with it: “Truthfully I enjoyed almost everything about [Sommers’s] movie. This is a thrilling, non-stop, action packed, special effects, intense mummy movie … full of exciting, funny, interesting characters that will entertain young and old alike. Sommers gives us a movie on the level of Indiana Jones.”

I’d have to disagree with McClure on this point. The Indiana Jones movies are classics for qualities that are missing in the Mummy franchise. First and foremost, Indiana Jones movies gave us a memorable hero; thus, it’s his name in the title, not the villain’s. People are there to see Indy overcome evil, not meaningless monsters making mayhem. A memorable, likeable, admirable hero is a rare thing in the movies; most disposable adventure movies hold our attention by the flair of the villain while the heroes are rather boring, running and shooting and giving the monster something to chase. Can you imagine The Mummy Returns re-titled Rick O’Connell Returns? I don’t think so. Director Steven Sommers seems determined to recycle as much of the Indiana Jones franchise as he can without lawsuits for plagiarism, aspiring for the same kind of fame and fortune. Sean Means at Film.com also saw unsettling rip-offs from other films: “the Jules Verne-like dirigible with the African Queen fuselage … and swordfights between [the women] that prove Sommers was one of the millions who saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” This provokes The New York Times‘ Elvis Mitchell to claim, “The Mummy Returns may be the least original motion picture ever. It even beats its 1999 predecessor … because at least the first film wasn’t stealing from itself in addition to the collected works of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and Universal’s 1930’s genre films.”

Many will claim that critical analyses of these action movies are pointless. “Hey, quit taking it so seriously,” a few friends have told me. “It’s just meant to be fun.” That may be the case. Critics can sometimes be snobs. But some of us prefer movies that are as fun to think about afterwards as they are to watch. Or, put another way, bring back Indiana Jones.

* * *

More monsters wreaked havoc this week in The Forsaken, a derivative, hyperviolent, gory vampire movie that most critics found far from scary or even entertaining. Preview‘s writer calls the film “a teen version of 1998’s John Carpenter’s Vampires” and concludes that “this film has little new to offer and shouldn’t make a much of a dent at the box office. The movie is filled with gratuitous nudity, graphic violence, and excessive foul language.” “Like the undead in Near Dark and From Dusk Till Dawn,” notes Entertainment Weekly‘s Bruce Fretts, “these sunlight phobic creatures inexplicably hang out in the blindingly bright Southwest.” Fretts cautions viewers of the film’s “Weed Eater editing” and gratuitous violence. One incident in particular troubles him: “A cop who pulls Rex over for speeding gets blown away by a vampire with a shotgun and then has his body set ablaze with gasoline. Somebody call Joe Lieberman.” Fretts is not exaggerating—as newspapers report foolish and dangerous youngsters repeating acts of violence they see onscreen, this is not the sort of thing that belongs in frivolous entertainment.

Side Dishes

Meanwhile, a far more troubling monster disturbed moviegoers who sought out Faithless. The monster is infidelity, and the devastation it wreaks on the family at the center of this picture is reportedly a difficult thing to endure. Most of the names and specifics here are fictional—like Marianne, the unfaithful wife, and David, the man who interferes with Marianne’s marriage to an older man simply called “Bergman”—but fans of Ingmar Bergman films will recognize the semi-autobiographical nature of his writing. They may also notice that director Liv Ullman, who has played an important role in Bergman’s life, brings notes of grace to the story of a man who cannot forgive himself.

Movieguide notes that the film is “a beautifully crafted movie in the tradition of Ingmar Bergman.” “In its intense way,” Ted Baehr writes, “Faithless is a diatribe against adultery, a condemnation of a faithless culture, a refutation of a life poorly lived. For an older audience, it may say to them that they need to reconsider their lives and give more joy and faithfulness to those around them. Like a well-crafted symphony, this is not a movie for everyone, but it almost redeems the angst that can be found in Ingmar Bergman’s movies. Liv Ullman has learned from Bergman and turned his sense of shame into a longing for something more—perhaps even God.” Preview‘s unnamed critic observes, “the film … shows the emotional devastation caused by adultery and subsequent divorce.” This review also notes that, “It may be a hit on the art-house circuit, but Bergman films rarely find large audiences willing to sit through the lengthy emotional treks.” Both reviews caution viewers of scenes of a sexual nature that include nudity.

Mainstream critics seemed ecstatic to have such a rich movie experience during this dry season. “Faithless is not made of soap opera sincerity,” writes Roger Ebert, “but from the messiness of people who might later wish they had behaved differently.” Peter Brunette at Film.com exclaims, “All this without the slightest concession to MTV editing, graphic sexuality, unconvincingly ‘sympathetic’ characters, or clearly marked ethical boundaries to help us decide what to think. The pace of the first half of the movie is so slow that you will be tempted to give up. Don’t. It’s completely clear in retrospect that the inordinate power of the last third of the film depends entirely on the lengthy setting up that has preceded it.”

Michael Wilmington at the Chicago Tribune offers higher praise: “Most of us simply suffer through the anguish of our lives, or try the best we can to learn from it. In Faithless, the 82-year-old Ingmar Bergman takes one of the most painful, shameful episodes of his own life and … transmutes it into magical, brilliant artistry.” He calls the films of Ullmann and Bergman “some of the major films of the 20th century”, and Faithless “one of the screen’s finest portrayals of infidelity and its consequences.” He concludes, “Some people may dismiss Faithless as overlong and repetitive, perhaps even moralistic, but it takes us to the very core of drama. This is a near perfect film.”

At The Village Voice, Michael Atkinson goes further, not only noting the film’s excellence, but that it signifies the emergence of an important new theme in contemporary filmmaking: the responsibility of parenthood. “Bergman is nothing if not an artist finely focused on secret narrative weaponry and snowballing decimation … ‘Is this how we pay?’ Marianne murmurs at one point, just as the movie subtly refocuses upon the actual cost of whimsical family collapse—the needless, hellacious dynamiting of a child’s world. Faithless becomes contingent on that little girl, on the moment when she closes up and walks out of the room, and in that Bergman has sampled the new great theme of modern culture: parental anxiety. The plight of children as they suffer the whims of the adult world has become one of movies’ primary issues.”

Maybe this calls for a sequel … The Mommy Returns.

Still Cooking

Free of monsters and messy realistic human drama, the Sylvester Stallone actioner Driven continued to draw audiences. This week, CultureWatch.net proposes questions for further discussion of the film: “Everything in life is competition, and we want to succeed and win, just like the characters, because we see all around us, in sports, in business, in schools, that winning is everything. This message of ‘doing what it takes to win’ often means we shut out people, throw away what is truly important and lose our focus, like the characters in the movie. In a competitive situation, can you really be a winner without finishing first? Most people would probably say they believe “winning isn’t everything” but in today’s society, does that notion still hold true?” (See our earlier roundup of reviews here.)

Next week:A Knight’s Tale and other early entries in the summer movie season get their share of critical responses.

Jeffrey Overstreet is on the board of Promontory Artists Association, a non-profit organization based in Seattle, which provides community, resources, and encouragement for Christian artists. He edits an artists’ magazine (The Crossing), publishes frequent film and music reviews on his Web site (Looking Closer), and is at work on a series of novels.

Related Elsewhere

See earlier Film Forum postings for these other movies in the box-office top ten: Bridget Jones’s Diary, Spy Kids, Along Came a Spider, Blow, Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles, Joe Dirt, One Night at McCool’s, Memento, and Town and Country.

Christians and Animists Face Off Over Loud Worship in Ghana

“Praying to get to the World Cup, and other stories from mainstream media sources around the globe.”

We shall not remain silent, say Christians in Ghana

Now that the center of Christianity has shifted away from Europe and the West to Africa, Asia, and Latin America, a lot of folks are worried about syncretism. As Weblog has earlier noted, such concerns tend to de-emphasize how much the West has syncretized Christianity with local values and customs and overlook the animosity that Christians often hold toward the beliefs they or their ancestors used to hold. The latter is currently being illustrated in Accra, Ghana, where Homowo, the harvest festival, has begun. Homowo is practiced by the Ga, a mostly animist people who constitute about 10 percent of Ghana's population but are most common in the capital city of Accra. Depending on who you ask, Homowo either means "hooting or jeering at hunger," or "hunger tomorrow," but in practice what it means is the outlawing of drums and loud music for a month. That's a problem for Accra's Christian churches, which regularly use loud music and drums in Sunday morning worship.

In most past years, the Ga Traditional Council (the ruling body of elders) simply ignored the churches, which in turn tried not to antagonize. But according to The Daily Mail and Guardian of Johannesburg, South Africa, this year is different. "The Ga people will not allow widespread violation of the ban," even in churches, acting Traditional Council president Nii Adottey Obuo said.

Sam Koranchie Ankrah, a leader of the Charismatic Churches Association, responds, "We will not be intimidated by the threat from the Ga Traditional Council. We have the right to worship and we would go ahead. It is up to the security authorities to ensure that a group of people under the name of tradition do not infringe our constitutional right to worship freely." But the security authorities are themselves worried that this year will see greater confrontation than in 1999, when violence broke out between Christians and animists (The U.S. State Department's 2000 Report on Religious Freedom in Ghana noted the incidents). "We have been receiving reports of the churches forming what they call 'warrior squads' to fight the Ga youth who may be attacking them for drumming within the churches," says an unnamed senior police officer. "Security wise, it doesn't look too good."

Liberia wants divine intervention in World Cup We get some wacky sports-and-religion stories here in the U.S., but usually it's not taken all that seriously. In the qualifying rounds for the World Cup, however, Liberia and Nigeria are deadly serious about using prayer to ensure victory as they face each other. Liberia has formed at 57-man praying party, headed by the religious adviser to the Liberian government, to pray for victory at the matches. Team prayers have also been mandated. Nigeria has responded by organizing both Muslim and Christian prayer sessions, and team chairman Alhaji Waheed Yusuf has called for the whole country to pray for victory, saying "it is important at this crucial period."

Other articles about Africa:

Churches drop bid on Ghai's group | Evangelical churches yesterday dropped their attempt to have the operations of the Constitution of Kenya Review Commission halted. (The Nation, Nairobi)
Reform plea flops | High Court judge refuses bid by church leaders to paralyse the Constitution of Kenya Review Commission (The Nation, Nairobi)
Zamfara State amputates man's wrist for theft | Second such punishment since Shari'ah law was introduced in the state in 1999. (Panafrican News Agency)

Related Elsewhere

See our past Weblog updates:

May 9 | 8 | 7

May 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | April 30

April 27 | 26 | 25 | 24 | 23

April 20 | 19 | 18 | 17 | 16

April 12 | 11 | 10 | 9

April 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2

March 30 | 29 | 28 | 27 | 26

March 23 | 22 | 21 | 20 | 19

March 16 | 15 | 13 | 12

- More from Ted Olsen

History

Disciples of Christ Board Apologizes For Not Doing More to Oppose Slavery

“Suing over the golden rule, and Jabez’s territory continues to expand.”

The General Board of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) has apologized for not doing enough in the 19th century to oppose slavery.

At a meeting from April 21 to 24, the board of the 834,000-member Protestant denomination passed a resolution declaring that many religious communities in the U.S., including the Christian Church, “failed to work or speak against the institution of slavery in the United States, a wicked apathy that permitted and resulted in untold suffering among the African people kidnapped by evil people and sold to Americans to labor without compensation and often subjected to inhuman persecutions by their white owners.”

The General Board “confesses the corporate guilt we all share for these evils and heartily begs the forgiveness of God and of all God’s children whose lives have been damaged or limited by these sins.”

The board had been considering asking the U.S. government to apologize for slavery, but board members realized they could not ask the government to apologize until they had apologized themselves.

Emily Jackson of Memphis, Tennessee, an African American member of the board and the great-granddaughter of slaves, accepted the apology. “I speak for myself—that when an apology is extended, it is to either be accepted or rejected. I personally accept the apology and the spirit in which it was offered,” she told Disciples News Service.

Curt Miller, a spokesperson for the denomination, says it was a “significant and important resolution” because for the first time the church had tackled the issue. “It’s really part of the Christian Church’s conviction to be pro-conciliation and anti-racist,” he said. “What the General Board was saying was the church was inappropriately silent.”

The Christian Church was one of a number of churches born as American settlers moved westwards in the early 1800s. Miller said some church members and leaders had been in favor of the abolition of slavery, and the issue was debated on the floor of the 1863 General Convention, at the height of the Civil War. But the denomination never became a symbol of abolitionist reform.

“We knew it was wrong, and we didn’t do enough to end it,” Miller said. “Slavery was an institution that crushed people, and still has implications to this day. Attitudes and practices that sprang from slavery still affect the U.S. today.”

According to the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, the Christian Church is “marked by informality, openness, individualism and diversity. The Disciples claim no official doctrine or dogma.”

Miller said the General Board’s resolution was not binding on the entire church, and that the board was speaking for itself.

The General Board is a 160-member body that comprises only one part of the church’s structure. The representative body of the church is a biennial General Assembly. “The board was speaking to congregations and not for them,” Miller said, adding that the church had received little reaction to the resolution.

Miller told ENI that he expected the resolution could have an impact when the General Assembly met later this year to discuss the issue of reparations, long a controversial matter in the U.S.

Supporters of reparations have said the U.S. should formally apologize to African Americans for slavery and make financial compensation to the descendants of slaves. Opponents have argued that such a move would be unfair to other Americans, given that slavery ended more than 100 years ago and that other groups have suffered discrimination.

The General Board recommended that the assembly call on the denomination to formally address the issue of reparations and give faith-based reasons for support of a formal apology for slavery. The board mentioned the possibility of lobbying for the creation of a U.S. Congressional Commission for the study of reparations.

Another possibility would be a church request that the U.S. government “issue a national apology for participating in and supporting the kidnapping, exporting and enslaving [of] people of African descent.”

There are about 73,000 African Americans in the Christian Church—nine percent of the denomination’s membership. The church’s national headquarters are in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Related Elsewhere

Disciples News Service and Disciples Today (the denomination’s monthly online magazine) both have articles on the apology.

The Associated Press also took note.

Adherents.com notes that there are almost a million members of the denomination in the United States, but that membership has dropped in recent years.

Slavery is a recurring topic in Christianity Today and our sister publications. Christian History looked at African-American Christianity before the Civil War, focusing largely on slave religion. Eugene D. Genovese wrote an article for Books & Culture on how Christians in the South sought to reconcile slavery with Scripture while Tim Stafford wrote on forgotten abolitionism. Tim Stafford also wrote an article for Christianity Today on learning from the abolitionists, and interviewed historian Lamin Sanneh on African slavery. Other Christianity Today articles have asked if God divinely sanctioned slavery, and whether Christian should apologize for it.

- More from Ted Olsen

Theology

Has God Been Held Hostage by Philosophy?

“A forum on free-will theism, a new paradigm for understanding God.”

Note: This article originally appeared in the January 9, 1995 issue of Christianity Today.

The September 1994 issue of Colors, Benetton’s oblique, oh-so-hip promotional magazine, began with brief answers to the question, Who is God? The respondents were of all ages and races from around the world; their answers ranged from the whimsical to the blasphemous. “My dad,” a six-year-old girl from Ecuador answered. A car washer in Pakistan said that God “designs the lines of a Mercedes.” God was variously defined as the wind, a waterfall, a circle, a couch potato. “I believe in science,” answered a businessman in Beirut. A journalist in Bombay said, “I am God.”

As Christians, we may respond to such answers with a mixture of sadness, anger, and uneasy laughter. Who is God? We know the right answers, the creedal affirmations; and yet that elemental, fundamental question is profoundly unsettling.

In the original preface to Knowing God, written in 1973, J.I. Packer suggested that “ignorance of God—ignorance of both his ways and of the practice of communion with him—lies at the root of much of the church’s weakness today.” With this issue, Christianity Today begins an occasional series exploring the nature of God. Our first installment considers a book that argues for a significant change in evangelicals’ understanding of God’s nature—a change, the authors contend, that will take us closer to the biblical conception of God. We have asked four theologically insightful scholars to assess this claim. Future installments will consider the nature of God from other perspectives.

Has God Been Held Hostage By Philosophy?

By Roger OlsonWhat is happening to evangelical theology? According to Clark Pinnock and his coauthors in a controversial new book entitled The Openness of God (InterVarsity, 1994), it is going through a paradigm shift that begins with the doctrine of God and will have sweeping effects on every other area of evangelical thought and life.

The heart of the change is this: God is no longer to be understood as an immutable monarch controlling human history and individual lives, but rather is to be seen as a self-limiting, loving, and suffering father who allows himself to be affected by his creatures. But two caveats are essential: this is not just a lively new version of liberal process theology, nor is it merely a lively new version of evangelical Arminian theology. These authors set forth for the first time a sustained, biblically based, rational argument that the God of the Bible is with us in time and does not know the future in absolute detail.

The new paradigm is variously called “the open view of God,” “creative-love theism,” and “free-will theism.” It is radical Arminianism—and more—but it stops short of process theology or Boston personalism (belief in a finite God). The authors claim that their model of God is not an accommodation to modern thought or sensibilities but is thoroughly grounded in the synoptic vision of the God who reveals himself in the Bible. It is a Hebrew-Christian model of God stripped of the deleterious effects of Neo-Platonism and other Hellenistic philosophies.

According to free-will theism, “history is the combined result of what God and his creatures decide to do,” and its God is “always walking beside us, experiencing what we are experiencing when we are experiencing it, always willing to help to the extent consistent with our status as responsible creations of his.”

How does this differ from process theology’s “fellow sufferer who understands”? The authors of The Openness of God go to great lengths to show that it differs profoundly. Unlike the God of Alfred North Whitehead and other process thinkers, free-will theism’s God is omnipotent in the classical sense: able to do anything that is consistent with his own nature and logic. In other words, the God of creative-love theism is the absolute ground and source of all creation (creatio ex nihilo) and could control his creatures if he wished to do so, but he chooses not to control by coercion or force, instead influencing by persuasion.

De-Hellenizing God The overall argument of The Openness of God is that Christian theology has been falsely polarized. For centuries, the doctrine of God (which the authors consider foundational) has been held captive to classical theism, which overemphasizes God’s transcendence and neglects God’s Trinitarian personhood. The effect has been a theology of meticulous providence in which God is supposed to control all events—including the original Fall and its consequent sin and evil. The authors argue that this is simply inconsistent with the overall picture of God given in revelation: a God who repents, grieves, and suffers.

On the other hand, too many theologians have thought that the only alternative to the God of classical theism is a finite God such as process theology promotes. The authors argue that process theology’s God is also inconsistent with the overall picture of God given in revelation. That God intervenes powerfully and will bring history to a conclusion in his kingdom—with or without human help.

Pinnock, professor of theology at McMaster Divinity College, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, and his coauthors make a powerful case for their model of God. In the first chapter, “Biblical Support for a New Perspective,” Richard Rice, professor of theology at LaSierra University, Riverside, California, demonstrates convincingly that it is not possible simply to dismiss all biblical references to God’s “repentance” as anthropomorphisms. Under the rubric of “Historical Considerations,” John Sanders, instructor in theology and philosophy at Oak Hills Bible College, Bemidji, Minnesota, argues persuasively that classical theism includes unbiblical and possibly unorthodox concessions to pagan philosophy. The real heart of the book is Pinnock’s chapter on systematic theology, which powerfully portrays the personal God of the Bible as self-limiting for our sakes. The chapter entitled “A Philosophical Perspective,” by William Hasker, professor of philosophy at Huntington College, Huntington, Indiana, will be the most challenging for many readers; but for those who persevere, it makes a strong case for the rational superiority of the theology of divine openness over competing ways of understanding God and his works. In the concluding chapter, David Basinger, professor of theology at Roberts Wesleyan College, Rochester, New York, shows the practical appeal of free-will theism for ordinary Christian spirituality.

The authors do not hide their philosophical presuppositions. Readers who cannot agree with these foundational assumptions will have trouble accepting free-will theism. Two basic ones are that logical contradictions—including so-called paradoxes or antinomies—are illegitimate in theology as elsewhere and that freedom means being able to do otherwise. While the authors are not rationalists in the strict sense of that word, they clearly place high value on coherence. That is, truth claims about God that involve logical contradictions are literally nonsense and should not be accepted in theology any more than in any area of intellectual endeavor. Therefore, one cannot say both that God knows the whole future in absolute detail with absolute certainty and that part of it is still open and undetermined (such as individuals’ decisions regarding salvation).

The second presupposition of free-will theism is that true freedom means being able to choose between options without any predetermination. This is called a noncompatibilist idea of freedom. It is not compatible with determinism or predestination. It assumes and requires a certain limited independence of the creature from God. Many evangelicals—especially Calvinists—prefer a compatibilist idea of freedom. For them, true freedom is being able to do what God knows and decides is right. Independence from God in any degree is lack of freedom. Of course, proponents of the free-will theism paradigm will object that this is an odd, even unique, use of freedom, quite unlike that word’s meaning in ordinary speech, and that it ultimately lands one in incoherence unless one is willing to say God is the author of sin and evil.

A test for how we disagreeThe Openness of God is a powerful and persuasive book. It is creative, bold, and Bible based. In spite of its strengths, however, a few serious problems remain that will hinder even some sympathetic readers from wholeheartedly embracing the model argued for. The authors deal inadequately with two major issues. They assert that part and parcel of the open view of God is belief that God does not know future free decisions and actions of his creatures. They struggle mightily, and with some success, to show that this in no way impairs belief in God’s ultimate sovereignty and power over the outcome of human history. But a shadow of doubt lingers.

Can a risk-taking, self-limiting God who rarely, if ever, intervenes in the free choices and actions of human agents know that history will end the way he envisions and predicts without having to rob free creatures of their freedom? It would seem that for history to end in the kingdom of God, as these authors insist it will, God will have to exercise more than loving, influencing, persuasive power. While it is consistent with their theology to believe God will do that in order to establish his kingdom, the question arises, Why believe he never or hardly ever does that on the way to the kingdom?

A closely related question concerns God’s beliefs and predictions about the future. The authors do not deal adequately with the question of whether God can hold false beliefs about the future. At the very least, they must hold that God predicts the outcome of historical processes involving free agents. Could God’s predictions turn out to be wrong? When Jesus told Peter that he would deny him, is it even theoretically possible that Peter might not have denied him? Either way the authors (and other advocates of limited divine foreknowledge) answer this question presents them with some problems.

I am not arguing that these are insuperable difficulties; the authors may have satisfactory solutions. For many readers warmly attracted to their model of God, however, these doubts will preclude their wholehearted acceptance.

Indeed, the open view of God raises many questions, and these will no doubt be extensively explored and debated in reviews, panel discussions, and even book-length responses. One question it raises that should underlie everything else is this: How do American evangelical Christians handle theological diversity? Have we come of age enough to avoid heresy charges and breast-beating jeremiads in response to a new doctrinal proposal that is so conscientiously based on biblical reflection rather than on rebellious accommodation to modern thought? This may be the test.

Roger Olson is professor of theology at Bethel College, Saint Paul, Minnesota, and editor of The Christian Scholar’s Review.

Afraid of Infinitude

By Douglas F. KellyOne of the best things about this most provocative book is its subject: it is actually about God, rather than being another evangelical “how to” or self-help manual. Clark Pinnock is certainly right about one thing: “The concept of God is the most important topic in theology.” To their credit, the five authors have done something far from universal among theologians and philosophers; they have written in clear, straightforward English prose. It seems to me that they have been honest and aboveboard in plainly expressing what they think. Even those who strongly disagree with their conclusions will have to respect them for their transparent clarity.

Moreover, one must commend their desire to make their theological discourse practical so that it addresses living issues such as the reality of intercessory prayer, and how to interpret evil and fight it in today’s world.

Several of these authors properly point out that the classical tradition has not always done full exegetical, theological justice to the matter of God’s impassability. I was genuinely disappointed that, because of crucial, exegetical and central theological weaknesses, these brethren were unable to improve this situation. Indeed, what they have to say on this point and many others constitutes one of the saddest intellectual and spiritual retrogressions I have ever seen outside openly heterodox thinking.

The really crucial weakness that devastates the promise of this volume to present a fresh, more biblical view of God is this: The authors feel that God cannot be infinite and personal at the same time. To deal with us personally, rather than harshly and mechanically (which is how they see “sovereignty”), God either must be finite or, at least, refrain from employing such infinitude. Some of the authors hold that God really is not infinite (e.g., God literally does not know what is future); some of them suggest that he must voluntarily refuse to use his infinite abilities as the price of humankind’s being guaranteed personal significance.

As a result of a selective biblical exegesis (that looks only at the human limitations implied in a word—such as repent—and strangely fails to consider the word in the light of the infinite subject to whom it refers) and a failure actually to read the Fathers of the Christian church, these writers attempt to get rid of God’s infinity by ascribing it to classical theology’s being the illegitimate offspring of the cohabitation of biblical concepts with pagan Hellenistic philosophy.

In reality, a careful reading of the Fathers (such as Athanasius, for instance) would indicate the profound Christianization of Hellenistic terms and concepts. Though they began as Greek terms conveying pagan content, such concepts as creation, being, logos, providence, and person were thoroughly transformed during the first four or five centuries of the Christian era in the light of Old Testament prophecy and the apostolic testimony to Christ.

Perhaps lack of familiarity with this field of study explains why the authors dismiss so easily the entire classical tradition as being no less Neo-Platonic than Pseudo-Dionysius, who in truly unbiblical fashion describes God as “beyond being.” But they fail to point out the very significant fact that when Athanasius (long before the time of Pseudo-Dionysius) quotes this passage from Plato’s Republic, he changes it to state that God is “beyond all created being”—a profoundly biblical concept (Athanasius, Contra Gentes, 2.2;40.2). This leads us to the heart of their problem.

It seems to me that these “openness” writers have failed to think through the profound implications of the difference between created (finite) being and uncreated (infinite) being. This failure to think clearly is manifestly demonstrated in their impoverished grasp of the relationship of language to being (i.e., epistemology). They seem to work on the assumption of the univocal validity of language for both God and man. That is, a word must mean for God the exact same thing it does for a human. For instance, “before and after” impose on God’s experience the same limitations they do on that of humankind.

But one wonders how they could have neglected the church’s pivotal teaching on the analogical usage of language (i.e., that there are both similarities and differences when the same word is applied to created and uncreated being). A brief reading of a few sections of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae or perhaps chapter five of E. L. Mascall’s Existence and Analogy might have transformed this book. And long before Aquinas or Mascall, Saint Hilary of Poitiers (fourth century) wisely remarked (in De Trinitate 4:14) that human words are subject to God, rather than God being subject to human words (in the sense of comprehensively defined and thus limited by them). The human mind “must not measure the divine nature by the limitations of [its] own, but must gauge God’s assertions concerning himself by the scale of his own glorious self-revelation. … Since we are to discourse of the things of God, let us assume that God has full knowledge of himself, and bow with humble reverence to his words” (1:17).

In other words, the reason the five authors of The Openness of God deny the infinitude of nearly all the attributes of God is their failure to have heard what Hilary (and the whole orthodox Christian tradition) could have said to them. That is, we must not attempt to project our creaturely limitations onto the God who made us (as though we had made him). That would be a violation of the second commandment. Rather, with Saint Paul, let us understand that the analogy (and glorious reality) of God as our Father makes sense because fatherhood is from God (Eph. 3:14-15), as the incarnate Christ and outpoured Spirit have shown us. Hence, as Athanasius says, “God does not make man his pattern, but rather, since God alone is properly and truly Father, we men are called fathers of our own children, for of him every fatherhood in heaven and earth is named” (Contra Arianos 1:23).

Human reason, therefore, must adjust itself to God’s being and not the reverse. Repeatedly in this volume, the authors univocally limit the infinite God by what they are able to understand (see, for example, the definition of divine omniscience on p. 136). This short-sighted procedure causes them throughout the book to deny one side of clear biblical teaching (such as God’s sovereignty) in order to affirm the other side (such as human responsibility). Sadly, all too little that they write in this volume can be taken seriously either by scholars or by ordinary Christian layfolk until its authors rethink their basic approach. May they be blessed in doing so!

Douglas F. Kelly is J. Richard Jordan Professor of Systematic Theology, Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte, North Carolina.

A Transcendence-Starved Deity

By Timothy GeorgeFor a generation and more, evangelicals have debated, defined, and defended the teaching of the Bible, assuming all along that the doctrine of God, as received in the historic Christian tradition, was an evangelical essential on which all faithful believers could agree. If that were ever true, the present volume indicates that it is no longer so. The revisionist view of God set forth here is neither new nor all that radical compared to other models one can encounter at, say, nearly any session of the American Academy of Religion. What is significant is that this book claims to be a “biblical challenge” to the traditional understanding of God by a team of scholars well known for their contributions to evangelical journals and learned societies.

These essays are really a form of protest literature. The authors claim to have found the classical doctrine of God, which presumably each of them once affirmed, to be apologetically inhibiting, religiously stultifying, and just plain old-fashioned. But their analysis is based on three false dichotomies.

First, they pit the dynamic, interactive God of the Hebrew Scriptures over against the static, transcendent God of the Greek philosophers. This contrast was given definitive form by Adolf von Harnack, who saw the Trinitarian and Christological consensus of the early church as the ultimate corruption by the alien spirit of Hellenism of the primitive truth of the gospel. To this G. L. Prestige responded wisely, “The Christian doctrine of God is a legitimate rational construction founded on the facts of Christian experience.” To be sure, the church Fathers did use contemporary thought forms and even new words such as Trinitas and homoousios, but they did so precisely in order to be faithful to the living God of the Bible.

Theologians should indeed beware of the seduction of philosophy. Augustine could not remain a pure Neo-Platonist once he became a Christian. Luther, among others, protested against Aristotle’s undue influence. But the so-called open God is himself shaped by philosophical bias, namely, a process view of reality that has far less biblical warrant than the classical metaphysical tradition.

Second, they posit the God of love over against the God of power. Yet the same New Testament book that declares “God is love” also proclaims “God is light” (1 John 4:16; 1:5), a reference both to God’s holiness and his eternal effulgence. It is not necessary to trivialize the noetic and ontic effects of sin, nor to minimize the penal and substitutionary sufferings of Christ in order to magnify the gracious, all-loving character of God. Nor should God’s immutability be interpreted as his immobility.

The orthodox doctrine of God affirms both his infinite power and his sovereign love. No less a defender of traditional theism than Charles Hodge wrote: “Love of necessity involves feeling, and if there be no feeling in God, there can be no love.” The God of the Bible is both personal and all-powerful, a God of covenant relations with his people, and yet utterly fulfilled within his own dynamic, Trinitarian life. How could Luther, Calvin, even Arminius, accept the former but fail to “see the conflict” with the latter? Perhaps it was because they served a greater, richer, more complex and less threatened God than one devised for modern sensibilities.

Third, they deny that God’s knowledge of future contingents can be squared with freely chosen acts. But divine foreknowledge need not negate human responsibility; indeed, as Karl Barth noted, divine foreknowledge is the “presupposition of its possibility,” denoting as it does the absolute priority and superiority of God himself to every possible existence distinct from his own.

On the view presented here, God cannot really know anything at all that will come to pass in the future; his knowledge is limited to the present and the past. This reduces biblical prophecy to wishful thinking, albeit divine wishful thinking. It also forces the authors to opt for the “oops theory” of salvation history. If Plan A fails, go to Plan B. And it leaves them little to say about eschatology, except for the vague hope that somehow good will triumph over evil. But the “open God” cannot guarantee that it will. He can only struggle with us against the chaos and keep on trying harder. One might feel sorry for such a God, even sympathize with him in his cosmic battle against the power of darkness. But one would hardly be moved to fall down and worship such an attenuated, transcendence-starved deity. The “open God” is a long way from the awesome, holy, unsurprisable (yet ever-surprising) God of the Bible, the God who “is a consuming fire.”

The authors of this book are my brothers in Christ. They have presented their views with earnestness and sincerity, even humility, rightly recognizing that God is far greater than our best efforts to describe him. I applaud their desire to submit every doctrine, including the most cherished and time-worn ones, to the searching light of God’s written Word. But in their desire to defend “God’s reputation,” and to construct “plausible models” and “convincing conceptions” that would make it easier “to invite people to find fulfillment,” they have devised a user-friendly God who bears an uncanny resemblance to a late-twentieth-century seeker. They need not be so concerned about “God’s reputation.” They only need to let God be God.

Timothy George is dean of Beeson Divinity School at Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama.

Whatever Happened to Luther?

By Alister E. McGrathThe contributors to this volume want to purge evangelicalism of the ideas of classical theism and return to what they see as more biblical ideas. This project is hardly new; after all, an integral element of Martin Luther’s theological program was to do just that (especially ridding theology of Aristotle’s influence). Luther’s theology of the Cross represents a classic approach to this issue, which European evangelicals have found of enormous value as we try to ensure that evangelicalism remains faithful to Scripture in its portrayal of God. Luther’s superb discussion of the suffering of God remains firmly linked with Scripture and shows a degree of Christological sophistication that leaves many of us breathless with admiration.

A quick read of this volume, however, showed that the contributors seem not to realize that Luther has been down their road long before them. This alarmed me. Why should we trust clarion calls to modify the evangelical tradition if the critics are not familiar with it?

It is in John Sanders’s chapter on “Historical Considerations” that the problem is made most evident. There he surveys how the “Greek metaphysical system ‘boxed up’ the God described in the Bible.” Yet the survey Sanders presents is derivative, based on secondary literature. And when we come to Luther, the results become uncomfortably clear. Sanders’s entire discussion of Luther is based on one reference to Paul Althaus’s Theology of Martin Luther (1963), one reference to a general work on the theology of providence, and a single quote from the 1525 work The Bondage of the Will. The fact that this polemical 1525 work is thought by some Luther scholars to be out of line with Luther’s constructive works is not mentioned; in fact, in this work Luther explicitly contradicts Sanders’s statement that, for Luther, “there is no God beyond the God revealed in Jesus.” What about the theology of the deus absconditus in The Bondage of the Will, then? There is a total silence on Luther’s massive contribution to a theology of the suffering God. Yet this theology has had a massive impact on modern Protestant reflection, as shown by the writings of Jurgen Moltmann and Eberhard Jungel, to name but two obvious examples. Where are the references to the Heidelberg disputation? to Luther’s superb exposition of the deficiencies of a Nestorian Christology, in which the implications of the Incarnation for the suffering of God are explored?

I found myself outraged by this lack of scholarly familiarity with Luther and his background. However, noting the strong Arminianism of some of the contributors to the volume, I decided to explore whether the theology of a suffering God found in the hymns of the noted Arminian Charles Wesley had been presented.

In the English language, Charles Wesley is probably the nearest thing to Luther in regard to a theology not just of a suffering, but of a dying God. Take, for example, the great hymn “And Can It Be?” with its famous lines “Amazing love! how can it be / That thou, my God, shouldst die for me?” This thought is also expressed elsewhere in that same hymn, as here: ” ‘Tis mystery all! th’immortal dies! / Who can explore his strange design?” I found that Wesley is not even mentioned in this chapter.

The book asks us to reject a classical evangelical understanding in favor of something else. But why should we abandon this tradition when, in fact, it has clearly not been fairly and thoroughly presented in this book? Modern evangelicalism has often been accused of a lack of familiarity with its own historical roots and traditions. Curiously, this book merely confirms that impression.

Alister E. McGrath is research lecturer in theology at the University of Oxford, research professor of systematic theology at Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and lecturer in historical and systematic theology at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford.

Related Elsewhere

This forum is being posted today to complement “Does God Know Your Next Move? | Christopher A. Hall and John Sanders debate openness theology.”

Roger Olson’s “Analysis of the ‘Openness of God’ Theology” was once available at the Baptist General Conference’s “Foreknowledge of God” area, but is now apparently only available through Google’s cache.

Other Christianity Today articles on openness theology include:

Truth at Risk | Six leading openness theologians say that many assumptions made about their views are simply wrong. (Apr. 23, 2001)

God at Risk | A former process theologian says a 30-percent God is not worth worshiping. (Mar. 16, 2001)

Did Open Debate Help The Openness Debate? | It’s been centuries since Luther nailed his theses to a church door, but the Internet is reintroducing theological debate to the public square. (Feb. 16, 2001)

God vs. God | Two competing theologies vie for the future of evangelicalism (Feb. 7, 2000).

Do Good Fences Make Good Baptists? | The SBC’s new Faith and Message brings needed clarity—but maybe at the cost of honest diversity. (Aug. 8, 2000)

The Perils of Left and Right | Evangelical theology is much bigger and richer than our two-party labels. (Aug. 10, 1998)

The Future of Evangelical Theology | Roger Olson argues that a division between traditionalists and reformists threatens to end our theological consensus. (Feb. 9, 1998)

A Pilgrim on the Way | For me, theology is like a rich feast, with many dishes to enjoy and delicacies to taste. (Feb. 9, 1998)

A Theology to Die For | Theologians are not freelance scholars of religion, but trustees of the deposit of faith. (Feb. 9, 1998)

The Real Reformers are Traditionalists | If there is no immune system to resist heresy, there will soon be nothing but the teeming infestation of heresy. (Feb. 9, 1998)

“Religious Freedom Can Be Ethnically Limited, Utah Judge Rules”

“Forgiving McVeigh, England’s murdered vicar, and other stories from media around the world.”

Judge: White man can’t use peyote in religious ceremony The Ten Commandments, crosses and crucifixes, Bibles, and other Christian objects have been at the center of many a religious-liberty case. But if there’s one item that has shaped America’s religious liberty law in the last decade or so, it’s peyote. The hallucinogenic cactus was at the center of Employment Division v. Smith, where a Native American was fired from his job and denied unemployment benefits because he’d chewed it as part of a religious ceremony. The Supreme Court ruled in 1990 that the firing did not infringe on Smith’s religious freedom. In response, religious liberty advocates convinced Congress to pass the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which was subsequently ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Now those two Supreme Court cases are the backbone of current religious freedom law in the U.S.—which Christianity Today columnist Charles Colson and others have argued is a very, very bad thing.

Now another peyote case may once again chip away religious liberty in the country. A Utah district court judge ruled that even though federal law allows Native Americans to use peyote in religious ceremonies (the law was passed after the Supreme Court’s anti-RFRA decision), self-styled medicine man Nicholas Stark isn’t allowed to do so because he has no proof that he’s of American Indian descent. “Clearly, there is a protection for the use of peyote for Native Americans, but Mr. Stark does not come under that protection,” Judge Roger Dutson wrote in his decision. Even more brazenly, Deputy Weber County Attorney Richard Parmley had argued in court that the federal law hadn’t been intended to protect religious freedom at all, but merely to “preserve the unique cultural history of the Native American people.”

“This is not just to get around Utah’s Uniform Drug Code,” Stark’s attorney says. His client “professes those beliefs, he practices them.” And it’s not fair to discriminate against his beliefs just because he does not “bear a particular DNA in [his] blood.” Expect an appeal.

McVeigh’s execution:

The McVeigh execution: There’s money to be made! | If we enjoy the spectacle, we mock justice, trivialize sin, and coarsen our souls. (Charles Colson, Breakpoint)
The divide on McVeigh | Churches, some followers disagree on killing a killer (The Dallas Morning News)
Saving McVeigh | Oklahoma City bomber deserves forgiveness and will be welcomed to heaven by victims, priest says (San Francisco Chronicle)
Not forgetting, but forgiving | Tim McVeigh killed his daughter. Now Bud Welch has lost his anger, too. (The Washington Post)
Fellow inmate counsels McVeigh | The devoutly Roman Catholic David Hammer, a fellow death row inmate, may be the last voice urging Timothy McVeigh to seek spiritual redemption. (Associated Press)

Murder:

Mystery of the vicar killed and dumped at sea | Teens arrested, but motive is unclear (The London Independent)
Also: Police fear priest has been murdered | Blood discovered in boat and car of Ronald Glazebrook, 81 (The Daily Telegraph)
Also: Hunt for missing vicar after bloodstains found (The London Independent)
American nun shot dead in Guatemala | Sister Barbara Ann Ford of the Bronx-based Sisters of Charity was shot in the head Saturday in Guatemala City in what local police said yesterday was an attempted carjacking. (New York Daily News)
Also: Hundreds mourn slain American nun (Associated Press)
Also: Politics seen in U.S. nun’s murder in Guatemala (Reuters)
Carey in row over ‘genocide’ bishop | Archbishop of Canterbury accused yesterday of failing to hold a church inquiry (The Sunday Times, London)

Faith-based initiative:

All religious groups could get money under Bush plan | “It’s a settled issue of constitutional law,” says DiIulio (Associated Press)
Private social welfare initiative draws scrutiny | Touted as a model for Bush plan, Woodson’s D.C. center illustrates concerns (The Washington Post)
Faith-based hiring bill draws fire | Democrats rap religion test (The Boston Globe)
Faith in just a chosen few | Already religious and political factions are trying to pick and choose who is worthy of inclusion under the faith umbrella. (Joan Ryan, San Francisco Chronicle)

Education:

Lawsuit challenges meal prayer at VMI | Grace before supper is violation, ACLU says (The Washington Post)
Also: ACLU sues to stop VMI dinner prayer (Associated Press)
Staying home to go to school | Academic reasons, not religious, are often cited for the dramatic increase in parent-taught students. Even public districts are now helping out. (Los Angeles Times)
Mother’s Day banned | Manhattan private school says observance can hurt feelings of children raised by same-sex couples (New York Post)
Seminary plans to offer Muslim studies degree | Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary officials say the new program is not an effort to proselytize Muslims but rather an attempt to eliminate miseducation and stereotypes. (Fort Worth Star-Telegram)

Missions and ministry:

Downing of missionary plane probed | “There were several contributing factors that tragically conspired” says investigator (Associated Press)
Antiabortion youths begin tour | Vancouver will be one of the first stops on a cross’ 15-month trans-Canada tour (Religion News Service)
Houston churches offer help for sex addicts | Attitude of caring, instead of condemnation is beginning to filter through Houston churches as they offer weekly meetings, other means of support (KPRC, Houston)

Church life:

Hollow halls in Europe’s churches | Attendance by Christians dwindles as number of faithful decreases (The Washington Post)
Church bell takes toll on hapless workman | Electrician working in tower knocked unconscious when the bell started chiming for evening Mass (Reuters)
Maverick pastor attracts flock with witty sermons | David Moore, pastor of Southwest Community Church of Palm Desert, Calif., has a growing radio following (The Washington Times)
Church keeps faith; continues to drink water | ‘God will keep us safe’ from cryptosporidium contamination, say Saskatchewan evangelicals (The National Post)
Cathedrals become temples of Mammon | While admission charges are being scrapped by national museums, the Church of England continues to take millions in ‘voluntary’ donations (The London Independent)
Sermon on the Mobile | It’s a gimmick, sure, and gimmicks and religion don’t always mix. But maybe this is a gimmick whose time has come: religious services via mobile phone text messages (Wired News)

Denominations:

Sally Army’s softer sell | With recruitment tumbling, the Salvation Army has decided to get rid of its military image (The Times, London)
Two neighboring Pimlico churches celebrate common mission, goal | They hold fete to honor their theological roots, joint redevelopment plan (The Sun, Baltimore)
Church heralds appointment of ‘people’s bishops’ | Ordinary churchgoers may be able to recommend people they think would be good for the job (The Daily Telegraph, London)
Also: People’s bishops may end Anglican secrecy (The Times, London)
Also: Worshipers may be able to nominate their bishop (The Daily Telegraph, London)
Greek Orthodox leader in Russia | No details of have been released of the topics that Archbishop Christodoulos will discuss with Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II, but relations with the Vatican are sure to be high on the list. (Associated Press)
Bishop pays symbolic visit to church | This Episcopal church left its diocese in 1999, calling it too liberal. The visit was not welcome. (The Philadelphia Inquirer)
Fight between liberal bishop, conservative cleric highlights divide in Episcopal faith | Washington bishop, a woman, wants to fire rector who opposes female ordination (Fox News)

Catholicism:

Theologians, church leaders to convene | Catholics’ views on teaching top Boston meeting (The Boston Globe)
Vatican clamps down on translations | Some modern inclusive usages are said to dilute intent (Associated Press)
Also: On the use of vernacular languages in the publication of the books of the Roman liturgy (official document, Vatican.va)
Millions of believers still flock to Lourdes (The Washington Post)
Turbulent priest rocks Belgian church | A gay priest has stretched Belgium’s ultra-conservative Catholic church to breaking point and enraged senior clerics by setting up a ‘rent-a-priest’ service, (The Guardian, London)

Jews:

LDS plan to take more Jews off records | Menachem Begin, David Ben Gurion, Golda Meir, Anne Frank, Albert Einstein, and others were apparently baptized posthumously by Mormons. (The Deseret News, Utah)
Catholics, Jews set forth plans for cooperation | Officials agree not to try to influence each other’s theology, call for protection of holy sites and the opening of all Vatican archives from the Second World War. (Reuters)

Abortion:

Archdiocese ‘disinvites’ member of Congress over abortion stance | Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) finds withdrawal “rude” and “combative.” (Religion News Service)
Abortion rights group vows suit over Web name | Prochoiceresource.com directs visitors to Abortionismurder.org. The ProChoice Resource Center, which owns Prochoiceresource.org, is upset. (The New York Times)
Minnesota Senate OKs bill containing waiting period for abortions | Gov. Jesse Ventura’s chief spokesman says it is a prime target for a veto. (The Star Tribune, Minneapolis)
Reverend plans prayer protest in front of abortion clinic | For the first time in more than a year, pro-life activists will be protesting within a 20-foot radius of a DC abortion clinic. (WJLA, D.C.)
Prolifers march on Planned Parenthood | Federal court of appeals rejects injunction designed to block demonstrations near abortion clinics. (WJLA, D.C.)

Family:

With this ring, I thee divorce | The Protestant Church in Germany is advocating a ritual for divorce, arguing that separating couples deserve a solemn occasion to mark the dissolution of the supposedly indissoluble. (The Times, London)
When religion breaks up a relationship | More on the Fonda-Turner divorce (Chicago Tribune)

Homosexuality and the church:

Lutheran bishop ordains lesbian | “I can no longer advocate this cause with credibility from a position of personal safety,” says Paul W. Egertson, bishop of ELCA’s Southern California West Synod (Los Angeles Times)
Gay row sends worshipers down the road | Bulk of New Zealand Methodist congregation, disgusted with the church’s gay-friendly attitudes, was subsequently locked out by Methodist leaders in February after threats were made. (The New Zealand Herald)

Books:

Please Lord, make me rich | The Prayer of Jabez, a book based on a passage in the Old Testament, has sold four million copies in America with the message that greed is Godly (The Times, London)
Also: Chronicles of an evangelical bestseller (The Times, London)
Tommy Tenney’s TheGodChasers Chased Out by Two Denominations | Stores have blacklisted bestseller because of doctrinal objections (Charisma News Service)
A saint whose lifework was on the cutting edge | Review of Francis of Assisi: A Revolutionary Life (The Boston Globe)
‘Left Behind’ and the rupture over the rapture (Karen Long, Religion News Service)

Pop culture:

One Christian band that’s built a strong following | Plus One, a boy-act alternative, says its well-scrubbed style fills a void on the scene. (Los Angeles Times)
Kinkade, king of kitsch, coming to a home near you | love him or loathe him, Thomas Kinkade is the world’s bestselling living artist whose soft-focus landscapes have taken America by storm—and are now heading en masse for Britain’s living rooms (The London Independent)
Earlier The Kinkade Crusade | “America’s most collected artist” is a Christian who seeks to sabotage Modernism by painting beauty, sentiment, and the memory of Eden. (Christianity Today, Dec. 8, 2000)
N.J. newspaper pulls ‘B.C.’ comic | Funny pages were no place for religious commentary, says Star-Ledger editor (Associated Press)
Also: Public debate best way to handle controversial ‘B.C.’ comic | From “Pogo” to “Doonesbury,” comic strips sometimes touch nerves and trigger controversies that can lead some papers to cancel them. But dropping a cartoon isn’t the answer. (Charles Haynes, Freedom Forum)

Related Elsewhere

See our past Weblog updates:

May 10 | 9 | 8 | 7

May 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | April 30

April 27 | 26 | 25 | 24 | 23

April 20 | 19 | 18 | 17 | 16

April 12 | 11 | 10 | 9

April 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2

March 30 | 29 | 28 | 27 | 26

March 23 | 22 | 21 | 20 | 19

March 16 | 15 | 13 | 12

- More from Ted Olsen

How Not to Read Dante

You probably missed the point of The Divine Comedy in high school.

Christian History magazine—which sponsors this weekly column—this week begins a three-month look at “Dante’s Guide to Heaven and Hell.” Yes, the bane of your high school English class has become the focus of our latest foray into the mind of the Middle Ages. But before you judge the magazine by the cover of your eleventh grade textbook, be aware: American literary education absolutely mangles the Divine Comedy.

First, most anthologies print big hunks of Inferno and then abruptly cut the poem off or zoom straight to the end of Paradiso. This treatment suggests that Dante’s journey through the afterlife climaxes with his vision of Satan. Wrong. If you imagine Dante’s pilgrimage as a road trip on Route 66, Cocytus would be Oklahoma City—a significant stop at the one-third mark, but a long way from the desired destination. (Note: No further parallels are implied between Oklahoma’s fine capital and Dante’s hellish lake of ice.)

Second, anthologies give inordinate attention to footnotes, riddling the poetry with superscripts and piling lines of explanatory text at the bottom of every page. Readers need some information on the many people, places, and events Dante mentions, because otherwise the poet’s points would be entirely lost. But overemphasis on names and dates causes the Comedy to read more like an old newspaper than like an artistic masterpiece. Returning to the Route 66 analogy, footnote freaks are the well-meaning parents who stop at every historical marker along the road. Educational, yes, but also extremely jarring.

Perhaps the biggest mistake made by many teachers and anthologists, though, is believing that a small dose of Divine Comedy will produce lasting benefits for their pedagogical patients. More often, the dose inoculates students against ever wanting to see the poem again.

We assume most of you dutifully received your Dante vaccinations, but we hope that the ill effects have worn off and you are ready to give the poet another try. He has so much to offer—adventure, romance, humor, reflection, and the most engaging expression of the medieval Christian worldview available.

The Comedy cannot be taught or appreciated on a syllabus schedule, because savoring it is a lifetime project. As twentieth-century poet T.S. Eliot wrote, “The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions. But Dante’s is one of those one can only just hope to grow up to at the end of life.”

Yet even a little taste of the Comedy, as we hope to offer in this issue, yields rewards. In the words of C.S. Lewis, “There is so much besides poetry in Dante that anyone but a fool can enjoy him in some way or another.”

Elesha Coffman is associate editor of Christian History.

Related Elsewhere

More Christian history, including a list of events that occurred this week in the church’s past, is available at ChristianHistory.net. Subscriptions to the quarterly print magazine are also available.

This week, ChristianHistory.net looks at what a famous painting of the poet, Domenico di Michelino’s Dante with His Poem (1465) reveals about Dante’s life, legend, and legacy. Next week, Wheaton College’s Rolland Hein examines how Dante’s description of a pilgrimage through the realms of death demonstrates how Christians should live.

Digital Dante and Dante Alighieri on the Web both offer The Divine Comedy, of course (in several translations), but also other works and information about his life from scholarly and popular perspectives.

Christian History Corner appears every Friday at ChristianityToday.com. Previous Christian History Corners include:

If My People Will Pray | The U.S. National Day of Prayer Turns 50, but its origins are much older. (May 4, 2001)

Mutiny and Redemption | The rarely told story of new life after the destruction of the H.M.S. Bounty. (Apr. 27, 2001)

Book Notes | New and noteworthy releases on church history that deserve recognition. (Apr. 20, 2001)

A Primer on Paul | The History Channel uses Holy Saturday not to discuss Jesus, but the apostle who spread his message. (Apr. 12, 2001)

Image Is Everything | The Taliban’s destruction of Buddhist statues is only the latest controversy over the Second Commandment. (Apr. 6, 2001)

Christian Education for All | The first Sunday schools provide a positive example of government partnerships with faith-based organizations.(Mar. 23, 2001)

The Sport of Saints? | Forget St. Pat’s. It’s time for March Madness, baby! (And yes, it’s Christian.) (Mar. 16, 2001)

Digging in China | Christianity in the world’s most populous country may be a lot older than anybody imagined. (Mar. 9, 2001)

Food for the Soul? | Lenten traditions range from fowl-turned-fish to pretzels. (Mar. 2, 2001)

The Radical Kirk | The Church of Scotland has a long history of intense reforms. (Feb. 23, 2001)

Marching to Zion | The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church celebrates its 200th anniversary today. (Feb. 16, 2001)

Innovating with the Flow | John and Charles Wesley harnessed the momentum of their time. (Feb. 9, 2000)

Taken Up in Glory

“The Ascension has been forgotten in many Protestant churches, jettisoning an essential part of the Christian story.”

This Thursday, May 24, is Ascension Day. The Feast of the Ascension, Saint Augustine wrote, “is that festival which confirms the grace of all the festivals together, without which the profitableness of every festival would have perished.” And yet in many Protestant churches, this week will pass without even a mention of the Ascension.

So it was in the Baptist churches in which I was raised. The church calendar had been discarded long ago, tainted with Romanism. And so it is in many contemporary congregations that seek to remove barriers to the unchurched.

But the Ascension can’t be jettisoned without losing an essential part of the Christian story. Yes, there is the great triumph of the Resurrection, the victory over sin, death, and the Devil. But the Ascension is not to be conflated with the Resurrection, and to celebrate the former is not in any way to diminish the latter.

Christ “was made known in the flesh, vindicated in the Spirit, beheld by angels, preached among the nations, believed on in this world, taken up in glory,” we are told in 1 Tim. 3:16. The Ascension marks the beginning of the church—and anticipates the Second Coming. It requires us to think in Trinitarian terms, as Christ ascends to sit at the right hand of the Father, where he is our high priest, and promises the Spirit to the church.

In “The Call to be Formed and Transformed by the Spirit of the Ascended Christ” (a chapter in The Unnecessary Pastor: Rediscovering the Call, published by Eerdmans last year), Marva Dawn urges us “to restore Ascension Day as a major church holy day.” A good first step would be for each of us to work for such restoration in our congregations.

But that is a first step only. “Ascension,” Dawn writes, “is a deep symbol that people don’t understand any more because we so rarely discuss it.” We need to talk about Ascension with children, in Sunday school, in sermons; we need to represent it visually, to make it real.

For pastors and others who want to undertake a systematic study of this neglected subject, the best book I know is Douglas Farrow’s Ascension and Ecclesia: On the Significance of the Doctrine of the Ascension for Ecclesiology and Christian Cosmology (T&T Clark/Eerdmans, 1999). Farrow’s book is brilliant, extraordinarily learned, and densely argued. It doesn’t yield its bounty easily. But those who read it will never again be willing to relegate the Ascension to the back shelves of doctrine, to be dusted off every once in a while and then returned to obscurity.

John Wilson is editor of Books & Culture and editor-at-large for Christianity Today.

Related Elsewhere

Visit Books & Culture online at BooksandCulture.com or subscribe here.

The Unnecessary Pastor and Ascension and Ecclesia can be ordered at ChristianBook.com and other book retailers.

See two recent Christianity Today articles on the Ascension, reposted on our Web site today:

The Day We Were Left Behind | Hungry as we are for the presence of God, the one thing we do not need is a day to remind us of God’s absence. (May 18, 1998)

The Grand Farewell | We tend to focus on the way Jesus came into the world. It will pay us not to overlook the way he left. (May 18, 1992)

The Text This Week offers lectionary readings, links to fine art and films with Ascension themes, contemporary and historical sermons on the Ascension, and other resources.

Books & Culture Corner appears Mondays at ChristianityToday.com. Earlier Books & Culture Corners include:

Who Won? Who Cares? | Skip the latest ballot reviews and read Italo Calvino’s brilliant election novella “The Watcher.” (May 14, 2001)

Infamy Indeed | John Gregory Dunne suggests imperialistic Americans got what they deserved at Pearl Harbor. (May 7, 2001)

Rantings of a Not-So-Primly Dressed Person With Too Much Time | The Chronicle of Higher Education infuses some not-so-subtle bigotry into its fetal-tissue research coverage. (Apr. 30, 2001)

Big Numbers, Big Problems | Christianity is in the midst of a massive global shift. But how much of a difference is it making in its new homelands? (Apr. 16, 2001)

DiIulio Keeps Explaining, But Is Anyone Listening? | At a media luncheon in Washington about Bush’s faith-based initiatives, answered questions get asked one more time. (Apr. 9, 2001)

Public-izing Faith | Recent articles in Touchstone, Commonweal, and The New York Times serve as reminders that faith is not merely “a private thing.” (Apr. 2, 2001)

How Can I Keep From Singing? | Arne Bergstrom has looked suffering square in the eye all over the world. Now he sings about hope. (Mar. 26, 2001)

To Poland, for an Evening | Once in a great while, a film like Kieslowski’s The Decalogue discovers how to transport an audience. (Mar. 19, 2001)

Examining Peacocke’s Plumage | The winner of the 2001 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion rejects everything resembling Christian orthodoxy, but that doesn’t stop him from co-opting the language. (Mar. 12, 2001)

Are Scientists Taking Orders from Pat Robertson? | A Salon.com essay accuses the Intelligent Design movement of being primarily an arm of “conservative Republicans” and the “religious right.” (Mar. 5, 2001)

Had Morse No Code? | Like much popular art, the finale of Inspector Morse functions like a dream of the collective unconscious. (Feb. 26, 2001)

Theology

The Grand Farewell

We tend to focus on the way Jesus came into the world. It will pay us not to overlook the way he left.

Christmas means poinsettias and pageants; Easter, masses of snow-white lilies and the grand sounds of the “Hallelujah” chorus. But Ascension Day usually comes and goes without a trace: no special flowers, no bathrobe drama—not even a bare word of recognition. Yet this day commemorates a watershed event.

We pay a lot of attention to Jesus’ coming into the world as a baby at Christmas. Then the fanfare was impressive: stars, angels, heavenly hosts. But Jesus left the world, too, and his leaving is cause for celebration.

A cloud took him Jesus’ ascension was witnessed by only his disciples. Three New Testament passages give accounts.

Mark 16:19-20 indicates that after Jesus commissioned his disciples, he was received into heaven and was seated at the “right hand of God.” While this phrase may sound jarringly graphic to us, it is best understood as a metaphor for power and authority. In Scripture, to be “seated at the right hand of God” is to be given a supreme place of honor and authority, a role God granted symbolically to Old Testament kings (Ps. 110:1). Mark’s gospel proclaims that Jesus journeyed from Earth to heaven and now reigns with the sovereign authority of God (Rom. 8:34; Heb. 8:1-2). Jesus now participates in the glory he shared with God before the world was created (John 17:5).

In Luke 24:50-53, Jesus blessed his disciples, “withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.” Then “they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy” (NRSV). At this Gospel’s beginning, angels announced “good news of a great joy” when Jesus was born (2:10). Now the Gospel ends with worship and praise as the disciples realize the joy of Jesus in their own community. The ascension climaxes Jesus’ earthly ministry, the goal and destiny toward which he was moving (Luke 9:51).

Acts 1:9-11 is the most detailed ascension account. Luke indicates there was a 40-day interval between the resurrection and the ascension. During this time Jesus appeared to his disciples and spoke to them about the kingdom of God (1:3). Jesus instructed them to wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit (1:4-5). The promised Spirit would bring them power to become Christ’s “witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (1:8).

After Jesus promised this, “he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight” (1:9). The “cloud” refers to the glory and presence of God—just as the cloud over the tabernacle (Exod. 40:34; 1 Kings 8:10-11) and the cloud that led the Jews through the wilderness (Exod. 13:21) represented the glory and presence of God with the people of Israel. Now Jesus is entering that same immediate presence of the Lord. He will be where God is (“heaven”).

That the disciples can no longer “see” Jesus indicates the times of Jesus’ physical appearances are ended. Now the crucified Christ, risen from the dead, has been “lifted up” and enters into his glory. He will no longer be visibly observed by his gathered community. Now a new relationship between Jesus and the company of believers is established. From now on Jesus will not be physically perceived but will be known through “what my Father has promised,” the “power from on high” (Luke 24:49, NRSV)—the promised Holy Spirit (Acts 1:4-5).

In all these biblical accounts, Jesus is physically separated from the disciples. Then they begin their ministries of witnessing to Jesus as the Christ after the Holy Spirit is given to them. The Ascension was the prerequisite for the outpouring of the Spirit (John 7:39; 16:7). Jesus left so the Spirit could come. Now the new people of God receive the Spirit’s power to proclaim Jesus as Messiah and carry out their ministries in the church.

But how? We scurry over it so quickly in the Apostles’ Creed, confessing that Jesus “ascended into heaven.” But what does it mean for us?

A door to heaven Since the fourth century, the church has celebrated Ascension Day on the sixth Thursday (or fortieth day) after Easter. Some may see the ascension as a tearful event. Jesus bids “farewell” to his disciples, signaling he will no longer be physically present with them. The joy of knowing the resurrected Jesus may have seemed short-lived.

But the disciples were not dabbing at their eyes for long, for the ascension proved a better blessing. Paul says Christ ascended so “that he might fill all things” (Eph. 4:10). John Calvin pointed out that “Christ left us in such a way that his presence might be more useful to us—a presence that had been confined in a humble abode of flesh so long as he sojourned on earth. … As his body was raised up above all the heavens, so his power and energy were diffused and spread beyond all the bounds of heaven and earth.” Christ’s spiritual presence is with believers wherever they are, whether trauma centers or traffic jams or on troop transports. Now we always have Christ.

Our faith receives many benefits from Christ’s ascension. Calvin, the premier theologian of the Reformation, listed three:

First, Christ opens the way to the heavenly kingdom. Christ’s ascension inaugurates the kingdom of God. The “age to come” has come to Earth because Jesus has ascended to heaven. Like a fairy-tale Prince Charming, this real-life Prince of Peace has awakened his cursed and sleeping people and brought them into God’s happily-ever-after. The way to heaven, blocked since the sin of Adam and blocked in our own lives because of our sin, has been opened—cleared by the work of Jesus Christ, through his obedience to God, death on the cross, resurrection, and ascension to rule with God.

Jesus has “entered heaven in our flesh, as if in our name,” writes Calvin. So in a sense, as Paul says, we are seated with God “in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:6). Or, as Calvin again writes, “We do not await heaven with a bare hope, but in our Head [Jesus Christ] already possess it.”

Second, Christ has become our Advocate and Intercessor. This is a vital New Testament theme (Heb. 7:25; 9:11-12; Rom. 8:34). The ascended Jesus is our advocate or “defense counsel.” More effective than Melvin Belli, he does not rely on procedural tricks or rhetorical eloquence, but still he changes God’s whole way of looking at us by standing in our place. Instead of looking on our sin, God looks on Christ’s righteousness. We are sinners, to be sure. But we are redeemed sinners. We are received by God’s grace in Christ as God’s children because of what Jesus did for us on the cross. We have one who acts on our behalf and opens the way for us to approach God without fear. Nothing could make us bolder! Nothing can fill us with complete confidence more than knowing that Jesus supports us and mediates for us in the presence of God.

Third, Christ gives us his power. In his resurrection and ascension, Christ was raised victorious over the evil powers of sin and death. As Paul wrote, “When he ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive” (Eph. 4:8, NRSV). Christ now sits on high, according to Calvin, “transfusing us with his power” while he “daily lavishes spiritual riches” upon his people.

We have power for the present, because he who sits at the “right hand of God” rules the world. The same power that directs the cosmos is now available by the Holy Spirit, who makes Christ real to us in the here and now. Christ’s ascension encourages us to look forward to the ultimate triumph of his reign (1 Cor. 15:25). This same power of Christ, the power to love, is ours every day, for every occasion—whether in love for the beggars and homeless, or for bosses and colleagues, or strangers, or even for those who have wronged us. Christ is not limited by time or space. Jesus is our constant companion.

Celebrate! So celebrate Ascension Day! Sing hymns that lift up Christ’s kingship. Picture Jesus as our advocate before God, and pray to him as our only mediator. Focus your personal and congregational worship on Christ’s presence with us through the Spirit. Claim the power and exercise the gifts Jesus has promised.

Why celebrate? First, because Christ’s ascension means our future destiny is secured in God’s kingdom. That is a destiny to dream about! It also means our worship and prayers are heard by God since Christ continually brings us into God’s presence. And Christ’s ascension guarantees that the powerful love by which he reigns in this world is available to us right now. Salvation is ours and the power for ministry since the Spirit is with us!

This article first appeared in the May 18, 1992, issue of Christianity Today. Donald K. McKim is editor of academic and reference books with Westminster John Knox Press, author of Introducing the Reformed Faith (2001), and editor of the Encyclopedia of Reformed Faith (1992) and other books.

Related Elsewhere

Recent Christianity Today articles on the Ascension include:

Books & Culture Corner: “Taken Up in Glory” | The Ascension has been forgotten in many Protestant churches, jettisoning an essential part of the Christian story. (May 21, 2001)

The Day We Were Left Behind | Hungry as we are for the presence of God, the one thing we do not need is a day to remind us of God’s absence. (May 18, 1998)

The Text This Week offers lectionary readings, links to fine art and films with Ascension themes, contemporary and historical sermons on the Ascension, and other resources.

World Vision Staff Missing

Thousands flee Angolan rebels on foot

Twelve World Vision staff members remain missing after a rebel attack in the northern Angolan city of Golungo Alto forced more than 2,000 people to flee 27 miles on foot to a nearby town.

The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (unita) captured Golungo Alto in an attack that began at 3:00 a.m. Monday, May 21. Hundreds of people seeking refuge have made the trek to the town of Ndalatando in the Kwanza Norte province, about 125 miles east of Luanda, Angola’s capital.

While World Vision reported 16 people missing yesterday, spokesperson Sheryl Watkins said that four of the relief and development agency’s members had been found in Ndalatando. Two sustained serious injuries. “The only reason we’ve heard from [them] is because they’ve made their way to the release center where World Vision is distributing goods to the displaced people,” Watkins said.

World Vision says that the remaining missing people possibly could have found refuge with family members or friends who are still in Golungo Alto. “We’re very worried,” Watkins said, noting that communication was cut with the town of 60,000 people after the attack. In Luanda, Anne Mesopir, World Vision’s director of ministries in Angola, has been communicating with people in Ndalatando via radio for the past two days.

The 12 people who remain missing—all native Angolans who work with World Vision—are a part of a 20-member team stationed in Golungo Alto. A large Christian humanitarian organization based in Federal Way, Washington state, World Vision has 100 representatives stationed throughout the southern African country. The group has operated in Angola since 1989.

Since gaining independence from Portugal 26 years ago, Angola has been ravaged by civil war. The government and the United Nations have blamed unita for the continued conflict that has left almost one million people dead and several million displaced from their homes in the last decade.

In Ndalatando today, World Vision has continued food distribution to refugees from Golungo Alto. “Among the 2,500 displaced people are 500 children who have been separated from their parents,” Watkins said. “That’s a concern of ours. At some point, someone’s going to have to get them back together with their parents.”

Related Elsewhere

World Vision’s press release tells the story from a relief-and-development perspective.

The Associated Press covers the UNITA attack from a political angle.

“In Greece and Syria, Pope John Paul II Tries to Heal Ancient Wounds”

Related Elsewhere

Mummy’s Day

Side Dishes

Still Cooking

Related Elsewhere

Christians and Animists Face Off Over Loud Worship in Ghana

More stories

Related Elsewhere

Disciples of Christ Board Apologizes For Not Doing More to Oppose Slavery

Related Elsewhere

Has God Been Held Hostage by Philosophy?

Has God Been Held Hostage By Philosophy?

Afraid of Infinitude

A Transcendence-Starved Deity

Whatever Happened to Luther?

Related Elsewhere

“Religious Freedom Can Be Ethnically Limited, Utah Judge Rules”

More articles

Related Elsewhere

How Not to Read Dante

Related Elsewhere

Taken Up in Glory

Related Elsewhere

The Grand Farewell

Related Elsewhere

World Vision Staff Missing

Related Elsewhere

Share

Related Elsewhere

Share

Share

Side Dishes

Still Cooking

Related Elsewhere

Share

Share

More stories

Related Elsewhere

Share

Share

Related Elsewhere

Share

Share

Has God Been Held Hostage By Philosophy?

Afraid of Infinitude

A Transcendence-Starved Deity

Whatever Happened to Luther?

Related Elsewhere

Share

Share

More articles

Related Elsewhere

Share

Share

Related Elsewhere

Share

Share

Related Elsewhere

Share

Share

Related Elsewhere

Share

Share

Related Elsewhere

Share