Bishop Spong's Articles January 2010

President Obama moved quickly to put the stamp of his vision on America. He immediately withdrew the presidential order that forbade aid to family planning clinics around the world if they practiced, advised about or in any way supported abortion. He disavowed torture as a practice never again to be condoned by the United States and in that single action immediately restored America's tarnished reputation. He announced his intention to close the prison at Guantanamo, Cuba, which had become identified with torture. He spoke to the Muslim world in a widely televised and highly praised address from Egypt, seeking to draw the world back from the brink of a religion-informed cycle of terror and counter-terror. He appointed the first Hispanic person, a woman of Puerto Rican background, to the Supreme Court of the United States. He made it clear that legal equality in all things for gay and lesbian Americans would be a priority for this nation. Even that did not seem strange to more and more of our citizens as they became accustomed to seeing Massachusetts' openly gay Representative Barney Frank appearing regularly on television as chair of the House Committee on Financial Services to assist this nation through the worst recession since the Great Depression in the 1930s. It was his competence, not his sexual orientation, that made the difference. Later in the year another sign of this new day became visible when an open lesbian, Annise Parker, was elected mayor of Houston, Texas, America's fourth largest city. Much about 2009 was inspiring. Many called these changes cosmetic, but we understood the power of symbols when the Nobel Peace prize was bestowed on our new president not for great accomplishments, it was too early for that, but for instilling hope into the world. Hope should not be underestimated, but hope has to be translated into action, and the subsequent changes that action requires always brings threat to those who have profited by the systems of the past. So for most of 2009 America was caught between hope and fear.

Even the closing of Guantanamo became controversial as soon as it became clear that the persons being held in prison there had to be relocated to prisons in the United States. That was fine with people until they realized that these prisoners might be housed in their own state or communities. Then opposition became visceral. To wind down the war in Iraq was the official policy of this new American government, but when it became impossible not to notice that the invasion by America had served primarily to suppress a religious civil war it made both the war itself and the present withdrawal seem to be violations of all of our ideals. Iraq was not the only disillusioning hot spot. The Israelis invaded Gaza to knock out the missile launchers that had been fired at Israel for some time. War is never pretty and violence is always met with counter-violence and peace in the Middle East seemed as far away as ever. At every point the effort to bring change brought a response tha t seemed to guarantee strife.

Next, health care became the focus of the nation. Everyone admitted that health care in America was in serious trouble. When the necessary changes to fix the system began to be discussed, negativity flowed without any restraint. Too many special interest groups had been feeding at the trough of our dysfunctional health care system for too long to want to see that system dismantled. First there were the lawyers who thrive on suing doctors and health care companies in aggravated malpractice cases. Next were the pharmaceutical companies whose bottom line was threatened if Americans were allowed to pay the same prices that Canadians and Europeans pay for the same drugs. A government that negotiates drug prices for Medicare patients was destined to be denied the authority to negotiate similar prices for a wider segment of the population. Then there were the insurance companies that keep themselves profitable by withdrawing coverage from those with "pre-existing" conditions . American businesses that had borne the burden of rising health care costs stated their need for relief if they were to compete with foreign companies whose workers are given health care as a privilege of citizenship by their governments. Then there were the labor leaders who had won major victories for workers in the past and who now resisted taxation on those "Cadillac plans." Finally, there were the victims of this peculiarly American system in which one's health care is tied to one's job. This means that in the downturn of the economy, people suffer a double jeopardy since they lose their health care when they lose their jobs. Some of them soon discover that they will never get it back if they have a pre-existing condition. All of this was put on the table when the health care bill, promised by the Obama campaign, began to be debated in the Congress.

The debate became incredibly ugly. Republican leaders, sensing a way to damage this widely popular president, became an uncooperative block of negativity. President Obama found himself being characterized at town meetings as both Adolf Hitler and a communist! It is quite difficult to be both. People, for whom the health care companies have long ago come between them and their doctors, began to berate any reform that would put the government between them and their doctors. Wedge issues were inserted into the debate. Abortion politics polarized the bill as primarily Republican legislators, who constantly advocate smaller government and "getting the government out of our lives," decided to add amendments that would impose a religious agenda on the whole body politic and prohibit abortions in any health care bill that received government money. Strangely enough, these zealots saw no contradiction. Then the public option was killed by the effective lobbying of the health c are industry, who managed to demonize the government's role in any health care plan. The debate went on in perpetuity, draining the energy and raising the fears of people across the nation. Obama's poll numbers began a steady decline. So did the popularity of the Congress. People began to say strange things publicly like "I want my country back!" One wondered who took it and how they managed to do that. The election of 2008 was fair and decisive. Power has shifted in this country. Some who were out are now in. Some who had been in were now out, but this democracy has not been subverted by external or alien forces. The plea "to get my country back" sounded more like the whine of the losers to me. Nonetheless the public debate was poisoned and the hope was that no matter how imperfect the final bill was it at least represented a first baby step toward universal coverage. The health care ideal was clearly compromised.

The decision was also made in 2009 to upscale the war in Afghanistan. Eight years in duration already, thirty thousand more American troops are to be deployed to this barren land to destroy Al-Qaeda, despite the fact that Al-Qaeda today is mostly in Pakistan, not in Afghanistan. So between the time the President was chosen to receive the Nobel Peace prize and the actual presentation of that prize, he became a "war" president. Politics is a strange game.

A backlash also appeared in the struggle for human rights for gay and lesbian people. In 2009 the defeat of gay marriage proposals before the legislatures of New York and probably New Jersey occurred. A referendum in Maine overturned Maine's Supreme Court's mandate to establish and recognize equality in marriage for all of the citizens of Maine. To the disillusionment of many, the primary support for homophobia in each of these defeats came from parts of the Christian Church. The Roman Catholic Church continued to oppose equality for homosexual people everywhere it appeared on a ballot. Why anyone would look for moral guidance on issues of human sexuality to an institution that has fostered a culture of sexual abuse and has resisted, publicly and privately, any effort to understand either the depth of the problem or their leaders' obvious cover-up of their crimes is beyond me.

On the Anglican side of Christianity, we watched the Archbishop of Canterbury be hoisted on his own petard. This man's hope and his consequent action was in the service of bringing unity to this communion by tolerating and accepting as legitimate the blatant homophobia in African churches and in dissident fringe groups in the developed world. Now he began to see the fruit of his misguided leadership. Uganda, with the full and enthusiastic support of its Anglican bishops, proposed a law that would imprison gay people, execute them for sexual crimes and fine anyone who worked in support of homosexual equality. That is the inevitable result of weak leadership unable to stand for truth and justice on a great moral question.

Those were some of the notes of 2009 to which we have said goodbye. It has been a roller coaster ride from hope to despair; from ideals to reality; from a nomination to receive the Nobel Peace prize to an intensifying of a rather hopeless war in Afghanistan; from a world where homophobia was dying to one in which there is a momentary setback; and from our dreams of a new world order to watching as the world wallows in the hatreds of the past. History never runs in a straight line, but we enter 2010 with a sigh of relief that 2009 has gone. Hope springs eternal and our hope is that the dreams with which we entered 2009 may be recovered and renewed in 2010.

Proposed health-care reform legislation included a provision that allows Medicare to pay for "end-of-life" counseling for seniors and their families who request it. The provision, which Sarah Palin erroneously described as "death panels" for seniors, nearly derailed President Obama's health-care initiative. Some Republicans still argue that the provision would ration health care for the elderly. Does end-of-life care prolong life or does it prolong suffering? Should it be part of health-care reform?

Dear Sally and Jon,

There is a paranoid quality about the health care debate. Much of it finds expression in the discussion about end-of-life counseling. Death is a fact of life just like birth. Our parents prepared for our births; it is essential that we prepare for our deaths. End-of-life counseling is about what extraordinary measures you want to have used to extend your life. Do you wish to be kept on a respirator indefinitely? Do you want a machine to keep your heart beating forever? What is the point between managing pain and destroying your ability to know those who love you best?

Death is not escapable. We embrace it like we embrace any other experience. Death gives life its passion. Death rings the bell on all procrastination. Only the immature, who pretend they will escape death, could possibly object to end-of-life counseling. Deliberate distortions like calling them "death panels" have so poisoned the debate that it borders on the nonsensical. Most of this we shall surely discover is produced and directed by the lobbyists from the insurance companies.

The Epistle to the Romans is Paul at his studied best. It is also the longest and most carefully organized piece of Paul's writing that we possess and is a logical, orderly and systematic treatise. He moves from his introductory and salutary opening verses (1:1-15) to the statement of the theme basic in all of Paul's work. Salvation, he argues, is the gift of God and it is available to all people. This theme is overtly stated in 1:16-17.

Next, he proceeds to build his case by articulating his perception of the need present in both the Gentile world and the Jewish world for the Christian gift (1:18-3:30). Then he spells out his understanding of the Christ (3:21-4:25). He concludes this section of the epistle with what is probably the most crucial and carefully stated words of Paul's career by articulating his understanding of what life in Christ is and can be (5:1-8:39). That brings his basic theological argument to its climax and conclusion as he reaches his crescendo in verses 38 and 39 of chapter 8, where he pens these climactic words: "For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord." We will return to the totality of this Pauline argument in the columns over the next few weeks in order to expl icate the earliest understanding we have of the role of Christ in the drama of human salvation. For now, however, I want to move quickly in an effort to create in the minds of my readers a clear picture of the totality of this epistle.

Having come to his powerful conclusion at the end of Chapter 8 Paul next moves on to what can only be understood as a large parenthesis that consumes him in chapters 9 through 11. Here he addresses a question close to his heart as a Jew and about which the Christian movement was at that time still torn in conflict. Why was it that the people of his Jewish nation as a whole appeared to be rejecting the promised gift of salvation that Christ came to bring, which he believed had been promised to them and for which, in Paul's mind, both the Jewish Scriptures and all of Jewish history had been preparing them? So deeply did the Jesus message resonate with the Jewish Paul that he found it all but unfathomable that all Jewish people did not see it as he saw it. So he wrestles with this question in this great parenthesis in a very public way.

Paul introduces Chapter 9 with assertions that cause us to recognize how painful this dilemma was for him. "I am speaking the truth in Christ, "he begins. "I am not lying," he assures them. "My conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit." No one uses those particular phrases unless that person is quite apprehensive as to whether his argument will prevail. Then Paul goes on, with much emotion, to express his "great sorrow and increasing anguish in my heart." He would rather, he says, find himself accursed and cut off from Christ forever than to find his people, his tribe, in their present negative position. He argues that the people of Israel have been given a special relationship with God, which he characterizes with the word "sonship." He recites the treasures found in Judaism: "The glory of the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship in the Temple and the promises of God." He traces this Jewish heritage as it flowed down the centuries from the patriarchs Abraham , Isaac, Jacob and Joseph until it came to what Paul believes is God's ultimate gift of salvation found in Christ Jesus. Yet he is aware that the majority of his own kinsmen stand apart from and are even negative to that gift. "Has the word of God failed?" he asks. He finds some consolation in that part of biblical history that suggests that not all the descendants of Abraham were destined to share in the promise. God had chosen Isaac, Abraham's second-born son, over Ishmael, the firstborn. God had chosen Jacob, the younger twin, over Esau, the older twin. These were not examples of God's injustice, he argues, but a recognition of the fact that no one receives the promise of God as a birthright, but only as a gift of grace. It is, he argues, God's prerogative to have mercy on those on whom God decides to have mercy. It is a matter of being receptive. The clay, he states, does not tell the potter what the potter can mold the clay into being. He quotes first from Hosea and th en from Isaiah to fortify his argument. He calls Moses to his aid. He suggests that Israel is still caught in its tribal identity and does not yet recognize that there is no distinction between the Jew and the Greek since God is Lord of all and does not limit divine grace by nationality or even religion.

Paul wants no one to suggest that God has rejected the chosen ones. He reminds them that he is an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. He then recalls that the Jewish scriptures inform us that both Elijah and Elisha were sent to others and not just to the Jewish people.

Finally, as if the answer he was seeking dawned on him as he wrote, Paul came to a new insight, a new conclusion. The rejection of Jesus by the Jews was simply part of God's plan. Because of Israel's apparent inability to hear or to see, the door to salvation had been opened for the Gentiles to enter the Kingdom of God and thus the message of salvation could reach the entire world. Israel's negativity must be seen as playing a role in the divine drama. The hardness of heart that Jews now displayed toward the gift of salvation was an act of divine providence since it was the means whereby God would offer salvation to the world.

In many ways this was a strange argument, but it managed to bring resolution to what was for Paul an enormous conflict. Salvation was God's free gift to all beyond every human division and even Jewish rejection was destined to serve that purpose. So Paul, greatly relieved by this new insight, brings this segment of his letter to the Romans to an end with a doxology: "O the depth of the riches and the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways." Even as Paul says this, he offers his explanation of how the mind of God works.

Having completed this long parenthesis, Paul now employs the word "therefore" to hook together the theological argument of his first 8 chapters with the ethical implications of that argument, to which he now turns in chapter 12. He reminds his Roman readers that they are to treat their bodies as a living sacrifice, "acceptable to God." He urges them not to be conformed to the world, but to be transformed so that they do not think of themselves more highly than they ought to think. He repeats his body analogy that the church must be like the human body, a single whole but with many members. Christians are to rejoice in the gifts of all the members. He urges them to let their love be genuine, to hold fast to what is good, to contribute to the needs of the saints and to practice hospitality. Followers of Jesus are not to be overcome with evil but to overcome evil with God.

Next Paul addresses the responsibility of Christians to the civil authorities. He suggests that all authority comes from God so they are not to resist political power. All earthly rulers, he declares, are "God's servants on earth." It was a variation of the later divine right of kings argument. We might note in passing that this or similar texts have been used throughout history against all revolutionary movements. The British used it against the Americans in 1776 and the North used it against the South in 1860. Martin Luther King, Jr., had to set Paul's words aside to carry out his role as the leader of the Civil Rights Movement. It is a perennial tactic of the established authority against the rising of a new consciousness.

Paul finally introduces relativity into things when he says that nothing is unclean in and of itself, but it is unclean for those who think it unclean. This idea was contained in Paul's plea for followers of Jesus to be sensitive to the values of one another. Christ, he concludes, was even willing to become a servant to the circumcised in order that Gentiles might glorify God.

Having glimpsed the sweep of his entire argument, we will turn in the next weeks to examine the core of Paul's thought in much deeper detail. I hope you will stay tuned.

Would you comment on the recently passed law in Ireland on blasphemy?

Dear Sally and Jon:

The recently passed law in Ireland against blasphemy, which threatens $35,000 fines for any person who "publishes or utters matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion," is a weird throwback to the medieval mentality. It also reflects a period of Irish history in which the tie-in between church and state was so intertwined as to be synonymous. To be Irish was to be Roman Catholic. To be Roman Catholic was to be Irish. If this law is not overturned, Ireland can no longer claim to be a participant in the modern world.

The existence of this law also reveals the low status now enjoyed by traditional forms of religion that needs to be examined and raised to consciousness. First, do religious leaders not understand any religion that needs to be protected from criticism by an imposed legal requirement indicates that it has no ability to stand on its own? Second, surely it must be assumed that any religious system seeking the protection of such a law is admitting that it intends to force its agenda on the entire nation and that this law will be used to mute any opposition to that agenda. I have no problem with any religion entity requiring that its beliefs and values be honored by its own members, even by the imposition of excommunication from that faith community of those who in good conscience cannot accept those beliefs and values. No one, however, should be subjected politically or legally to the values of a religious system that is not his or her own. It seems to me that the separatio n of church and state was designed to meet that situation quite specifically. We have seen the harm created in the past when this line was crossed and the legal process was used to obstruct birth control and family planning, to outlaw abortion in all situations and to make illegal any end of life counseling, including the use of palliative techniques that end suffering, but may shorten life. Such practices almost inevitably will make religion a political issue, and this law would require opponents of such practices to be silent. Did the Muslims who were being killed as infidels by Christians during the Crusades not have a right loudly and publicly to denounce Christianity for initiating these killings? What would this law have done to them? Did those Christians, atheists or the non-believers who were defined by their attackers as "infidels" and killed or who had their loved ones killed by fundamentalist Muslims not have a right loudly and publicly to denounce the religi on that was destroying them? Would the existence of a law like this Irish law not have commanded their silence? Do the Jews, who have suffered centuries of anti-Semitism at the hands of the Christians who have controlled the governments of most Western nations in modern history, not have a right loudly and publicly to condemn their persecutors and the religion that seems to inspire their suffering? Would not a law like this have criminal their just protest?

The assumption behind such a law seems to be that it is impossible for religion to do wrong and thus religion is allowed legally to stand above criticism. History has rendered such a sentimental judgment to be nonsensical. I was raised inside an evangelical Southern Christian tradition that taught me that segregation was the will of God, that women were by nature inferior, that it was OK to hate other religions and especially the Jews, and that homosexuality was a lifestyle choice made by morally depraved people and so ought to be suppressed, punished and even executed. Matthew Sheppard in Wyoming is a recent victim of this reality. If homosexuality is not a choice, I was taught that it was a mental disease for which a cure should be sought. That was what their religion had taught them to believe and so they passed it on to me as a virtuous thing to do. The leaders of my Southern church quoted the scriptures that they called "the Word of God" to justify each of these e vils. Had this Irish law been in effect, members of the civil rights movement, the women's liberation movement, those who worked against anti-Semitism and the Gay Rights movement, to say nothing of the movement toward critical biblical scholarship in the life of Christianity itself, would all have been subject to these fines. Criticism of the abuses of religion is as essential to human freedom as criticism of the abuses of government is. This law would make such criticism illegal and punishable by significant penalties.

It I lived in Ireland and had to face the imposition of this law, I would begin my attack on its credibility by seeking to discover and to expose the sources of support for such a law. Who is pressing for the creation of such a law? What is their agenda? How hidden are their real motives? Since the overwhelmingly dominant religious tradition in Ireland is the Roman Catholic Church, I would be compelled to wonder how and why its passage might serve that institution's needs. Would such a law, for example, be used to stop Irish citizens from criticizing the behavior of Roman Catholic leaders in Ireland as the atrocious record of child abuse on the part of its priests and nuns and its hierarchy's shameful record in covering up these overt crimes becomes public knowledge? Is this the source of the public pressure to pass this law? Would it be used to stop lawsuits that are based on both the abuse and the official cover-up that have now resulted in multi-million-dollar se ttlements as well as the resignation of several bishops and the documented fact that successive Irish archbishops were thoroughly involved in the cover-up? Only when I see who and what would be protected under this law, and who and what might be imperiled, can I make sense out of such an arcane and offensive new law. Religion, no less than any other human institution, can become demonic. No state should assist in that process by making critical statements about religious practices that might be offensive to religious adherents illegal. I hope this law will be overturned by the good sense of the Irish people. To start that overturning process today would not be soon enough.

Do American evangelical Christians have the right to go to a country like Uganda in order to pour out their uninformed and deeply destructive homophobic hatred under the guise of the freedom of religion? When that hatred results in the development of a public consensus that puts homosexual persons at risk, does it become more excusable if it arises from religious people or is sustained by a misguided use of Holy Scripture? Is violence somehow more legitimate in a free society if it is promulgated with stained glass accents? How do we balance the corporate responsibility of the whole society against the individual acts of those who claim that God, revelation or the Bible has given them the authority to embrace a different view of reality?

Those are some of the questions that were raised for me when I read the recent story behind the political campaign in Uganda to criminalize homosexuality and even to make it a capital crime. This campaign appears to have resulted directly from evangelical American Christians eager to transfer their culture wars to the fertile soil of Uganda in search of allies who might assist them in the preservation of their own dated and homophobic prejudices. This is the story behind the headlines.

In March of 2009, three American evangelical Christians went through Uganda pretending to be experts on homosexuality and simultaneously filling the people there with a view of homosexuality that is widely discredited in Western scientific and medical circles. They claimed to be able to "cure" homosexuals, even though there is absolutely no evidence that this is possible and massive data demonstrating that it is not. Their point of view assumes a definition of homosexuality as a sickness, a definition dismissed and rejected by the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association. In these public lectures they raised the specter of a "gay agenda" being imposed on Ugandan society. They described what they called "a hidden and dark conspiracy" on the part of "the international homosexual lobby," which was designed "to destroy Bible-based values and to disrupt the traditional African family." For three days these people delivered these incredibly uninfo rmed diatribes to live audiences. These talks were then audio-recorded for distribution throughout the land to literally hundreds of thousands of Ugandans, including political leaders, government officials and schoolteachers. The impression these visitors gave was that they were committed Christians who felt so intensely about the evil of homosexuality that they had come to raise the consciences of the Ugandan people, whose lives and culture might be at risk from the homosexual threat. The homosexual man, they said, seeks only to sodomize teenage boys, while the gay movement's goal is to destroy marriage and "to replace it with sexual promiscuity."

The facts, we now know, are that these three men were not acting out of just their personal homophobic agenda at all, but had close connections with two organizations. The first is known as "The Fellowship" or "The Family," a highly secretive right wing political organization, which operates out of a house on "C" street in Washington, D.C. At this address a major Christian lobbying effort is housed and here evangelical members of both the House of Representatives and the Senate gather to devise strategy. It was also in this "C" Street house where the sexual misconduct that involved Senator John Ensign of Nevada, Senator David Vitter of Louisiana and Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina, all identified as evangelical Christians, was discussed and tactics were devised to do damage control. Members of "The Family" are the sponsors of the National Prayer Breakfast, which nets this group a profit in excess of $1,000,000 a year. They have lobbied for the criminal investig ation of "Americans United for Separation of Church and State" and in favor of the "Houses of Worship Act," which would allow clergy to endorse political candidates from their pulpits without losing their tax exempt status. Through Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) "The Family" has redirected millions in U.S. aid to Uganda for sex education programs promoting abstinence and not coincidentally gaining for "The Family" a foothold in that country. This money caused an evangelical revival in Uganda, but it was also used to conduct "condom burnings," which was a major factor in the dramatic rise of HIV/AIDS in that nation. This was the group that served as the major sponsor for those American evangelical "sex experts" and the ones who thus saw to it that their rabid anti-homosexual message was effectively marketed to all of Uganda's decision makers and most of their citizens. A second group identified as a sponsor was Exodus International, a discredited body that profits enorm ously from its claim to be able, for a fee, to convert homosexuals into being heterosexual.

As a direct result of these efforts, one month after their visit a little known Ugandan politician named David Bahati, having been designated as "a rising star" by "The Family" since he first floated the idea of making homosexuality a capital crime, introduced into the legislative branch of the Ugandan government a resolution to adopt a slightly milder version of his killing sentiment called the "Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009." The effect of this bill, when passed, would be to criminalize homosexuality in Uganda by making imprisonment the punishment for being found guilty of this practice, execution for those who are openly homosexual and heavy fines for anyone who publicly spoke out in defense of gay people or who supported their cause. The Ugandan Minister of Ethics, speaking in support of this law, has declared that in Uganda homosexuals "can forget about human rights." The speeches on homosexuality by these American evangelicals were part of a carefully worked out st rategy to align Uganda first and then all of Africa with their own culture war agenda in the United States.

In this project, about which many Christians now recoil in horror, American evangelicals and other religious leaders have long given their tacit approval as well as their overt and covert support. One thinks of Rick Warren, who was invited to give the invocation at President Obama's inauguration over the visceral objections of gay groups who knew of Warren's intense homophobia. He is only one of the nation's religious leaders whose words legitimize the activity that we are now seeing in Uganda. Other ordained pastors serving small and large churches alike regularly play to the darker sides of their congregations and pour the fuel of their own uninformed negativity and sometimes their overt hatred into the public bloodstream of debate. The rhetoric of evangelist Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell has often been the excuse for violence against homosexuals. The failure of mainline leaders like the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, to condemn the overt homophob ia of Africa's Anglican bishops in general and of Uganda's Anglican leaders in particular is just one more compromise of Christian integrity. The frequent statements from Pope Benedict XVI that refer to homosexuality as "unnatural" and "deviant" also play into the hands of the spirit of violence now erupting in that land. Perhaps the charge that they are uninformed refers not only to their ignorance about homosexuality, but also to their inability to understand the gospel. John's Gospel does describe the purpose of Jesus to be that of giving abundant life to all. The proposed Uganda law is hardly in touch with that. Unfortunately, being ignorant is neither a crime that can be prosecuted, nor does it appear to be an impediment to leadership in the Christian Church. When uninformed religious leaders present themselves as experts in an area of life in which they have no expertise whatsoever and cause hatred to rise and persecution of the gay minority to be practiced, I bel ieve we should hold them to be morally culpable. Perhaps it is time for Roman Catholic doctors, scientists and psychiatrists to inform Pope Benedict XVI that his ignorance about homosexuality is no longer a private opinion, but a harmful public expression of his own prejudice. Perhaps it is time for Anglican leaders to confront the Archbishop of Canterbury with the fact that his weak and ineffective leadership has become not just a matter of longstanding private embarrassment, but is now contributing to a vast public evil. Perhaps the time has come to make laws that will punish and prohibit uninformed evangelicals from using the cover of their own biblical ignorance to violate the rights of others by encouraging illegal hate crimes. Perhaps it is time to say to those who, under the guise of religion, engage in counseling based on their vast ignorance, are in fact practicing medicine without a license and that they will be subject to prosecution.

Being religious, being able to quote the Bible or the teaching authority of the Church is no guarantee that ignorance is not being disseminated. I remind my readers that the evil of the Crusades was Vatican led; that the Inquisition was church directed; that slavery, segregation and apartheid were all supported with appeals to scripture; and that women were subjugated and left-handed children were violated by prejudiced ecclesiastical leaders. We can tolerate this kind of ignorance no longer. The unholy alliance between religion and homophobia must be expelled from the Christian Church. The need to act is now. The Christian Faith requires it. Justice demands it.

I have just finished reading Eternal Life: A New Vision. Thank you for writing this wonderful book, and thank you for sharing your vision of life eternal fulfilled. I embrace your vision with enthusiasm and I share in your celebration of our spiritual life.

In the early chapters of the book, you spend some time describing your journey, as a child and as a youth, within the boundaries and constraints and limitations of a conservative Protestant tradition. I can identify with many of your memories, and I can recall (20 years ago or so) sharing many of the "fundamentalist" beliefs and ideologies with young Sunday School students that I taught for 10 years within a Lutheran church outside of Ottawa. The stories of Genesis and Exodus and the narratives of the gospels rolled easily into the empty, hungry minds of the children and, in the spirit of most stories (and especially folklore), left these children excited and intrigued. But now, looking both backwards to where I started and from what I see today, communication or rather education of our young people becomes a little more complex and challenging.

If many (or rather, most) adults have difficulty jettisoning the literal interpretations of the Bible, how do we pursue the important task of presenting allegorical, symbolic stories abut the history of God's journey with humanity in a format and language that our young children can absorb and understand? Consider the following analogy: If we don't learn how to ride a bike before we can balance ourselves on two legs (and hopefully walk a few meters), should we not then continue to educate our very young with the images and stories that capture their imaginations and speak to their intellect (at that age)? Possibly, the problem with our Christian education process is that we never leave "the uncomplicated pictures" that we experience in the early grades of learning and that rather than maturing and growing in our divine-human journey, we remain closed in an understanding that we should have outgrown a long time ago. In other words, is the problem equally as much how we te ach, (i.e. training adults not to remain in a child's thinking) as what we teach?

Dear Mark,

I think you are correct. I might expand your thinking to include not just that we remain in childlike thinking, but we literalize the stories so that if the child rejects them, the child is made to feel that he or she has done something wrong or that either God or his and her parents will be disappointed. We do not do that with secular myths and stories. We do not teach our children that there really was a Little Red Riding Hood or a Humpty Dumpy who fell off a wall. The stories capture genuine human experiences. In Little Red Riding Hood the story is about young girls entering puberty being urged to stay on the "straight and narrow" path lest they be caught by a wolf and eaten up. The story of Humpty Dumpty points to and illustrates the fact that in life there are some things that once done are irrevocable.

Religion, because it seeks to provide human security, always seems to have a need for certainty and to literalize a supposedly inerrant source, serves that purpose.

Another factor is that so many adults have never moved beyond their childhood religious fantasies, so that they do not know how to cope with hard human realities; hence they seek comfort in the simplicity of yesterday in the protective arms of a heavenly parent.

As a church pastor, I believe the first step in assisting growth into maturity is to open the adults to new possibilities and hope that this knowledge will trickle down to the children. I do not believe in trickle-down economics; that usually is limited to the possibility that the wealth of John D. Rockefeller will trickle down to Nelson Rockefeller and not much further. I do, however, believe in the possibility that good ideas and even good theology will trickle down to a new generation. There is ample evidence that bad ideas and bad theology have done so.

Thanks for writing.

This is not to say, however, that Paul was without insight. He was a keen observer of human life and one who was a perceptive, even if an introverted, examiner of his own inner thought and being. Our task as modern interpreters of Paul is to separate Paul's incredible insights into human life from the dated and thus distorting world view of his day. It is not an easy task, but it is a doable one.

Paul was a human being with intense feelings. Prior to his conversion experience he was an uncompromising persecutor of the Christian movement. Following his conversion he was an uncompromising advocate for the Christian faith. While the object of his passion shifted dramatically his personality remained quite constant. Almost inevitably he interpreted both what he believed was the meaning of the claim of Jesus' divinity and what he believed was the meaning of salvation out of his first century understanding of human life, and in the process he always universalized the lens through which he viewed his world and himself. One must, therefore, never forget the highly subjective nature of Paul's insights.

Paul was also a Jew. He had studied under the great rabbi Gamaliel. He identified himself as a Hebrew, a member of the tribe of Benjamin and a zealot for the Torah. Judaism was the tradition in which and through which he viewed all of life. Paul did nothing, certainly including his religious life, in a halfway or lukewarm fashion.

We start to unravel this Pauline viewpoint first by looking at his understanding of the human situation. What does it mean to Paul to be human? From where comes the pain, the fear and the insecurity that marks human life? Paul was quite sure, out of his Jewish background, that human life was created in God's image with God's law written across the human heart. This human creature, who was in Paul's mind almost divine, had fallen from that lofty status into what he called "sin." It was, he believed, a cosmic fall that affected every human being, and it doomed all people to a life in bondage to the incalculable power of sin. So Paul, looking at all human life through his own experience, lamented: "We cannot do the things we want to do, indeed we do the very things that we do not want to do." Sin for Paul was an alien power. "It is not I" who does these things, he offers defensively, but "sin that dwells within me." We are not now and we cannot ever be, he stated, what we were created to be. The human impulse toward sin was, for Paul, so deep that it actually prompted the act of sinning. This impulse is not and cannot be part of nature, lest God be blamed for it, but it nonetheless holds human life in its power. Listen to the pathos in Paul's words: "I delight in the law of God in my inmost nature, but I see in my members another law which is at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law that dwells in my members." It almost sounds like schizophrenia, but that is how Paul perceived himself, and when he writes we hear his yearning to be freed from this state and his desire to be capable of directing his own life toward the purpose for which he believed he was created. To find the ability to do just that was for him the meaning of salvation, and it was this gift of salvation that he believed he had experienced in Jesus. Human life, which was, he thought, created for fellowship with God, instead has been estranged fro m God, divided within itself and separated from all others. His dream was to be made whole, to be at one with God. He sought a biblical explanation for this human reality in the creation story that, true to the mind set of his day, he assumed to be history and thus a divinely inspired analysis of the human condition. St. Augustine, the fourth century bishop of Hippo and the primary theologian in the first thousand years of Christian history, would take this Pauline insight and make it the basis for what is still called "traditional Christianity." It was because of this Paul/Augustine line of thought that Christianity still today wallows in sin and traffics in guilt. The Protestant mantra, "Jesus died for my sins," expresses it. So does the Catholic interpretation of the Mass as the constant reenactment of the moment in which Jesus overcame the sin of the world with his death on the cross. It was out of this mentality that guilt became the coin of the realm in institut ional Christianity and that is how and why behavior control has become the primary activity of the Christian Church. When this "original sin" was tied by Augustine into sex and reproduction, the repression of sex became in Christianity an aspect of salvation. Celibacy and virginity became the higher paths. Repression, however, including sexual repression, never gives life. It rather creates victims. Christianity has become the major religion of victimization in the western world. Bad anthropology inevitably creates bad theology.

Paul, perceiving what he believed was this fatal flaw in human nature, saw Jesus ultimately as the rescuer of the flawed ones. Since all human life shared in that flaw, salvation was a universal gift given to all, "to the Jews first but also to the Gentiles." In this gift Paul believed that Christianity had the power to transcend all human divisions, including religious divisions, even the divisions created by the holiness of the Torah, the Jewish law, which excluded all who were not bound to the Torah. Salvation in his mind was that process in which human wholeness is offered to all. In Christ, he wrote, there is neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, bond nor free. Salvation was a call to a new humanity and it was this vision that compelled Paul to become the missionary to the Gentiles, the one charged with turning the message of the Jewish Jesus into the gift of salvation offered to the entire world. When he wrote his letter to the Church of Rome, he spelled out th is point of view hoping that the Roman Christians would feel as strongly about this vocation as he did and would thus be willing to provide him with the means that he hoped would carry him and his missionary activities to Spain and thus to "the uttermost parts of the world."

Paul's message was in this one sense profoundly true. There is about human life a sense of separation, of loneliness and a drive for survival that does indeed make us chronically self-centered, at war with our higher instincts. Paul's way of understanding and dealing with that humanity was and is, however, profoundly mistaken. Indeed it is inoperative and, by literalizing this mistaken understanding, Christianity is today threatened with extinction.

As post-Darwinians we now know that there never was a perfect creation. All life has evolved from a single cell into our present self-conscious, enormously complex human life, which is for the time being at least at the top of the evolutionary process. Since there was no perfect creation, then there could not have been a "fall" from perfection. One cannot fall from a status one has never possessed. If we have not fallen from perfection, we do not need to be saved, redeemed or rescued. So the way Jesus has traditionally been interpreted falls into irrelevance. One can only artificially resuscitate a dying form as long as the presuppositions under-girding that form are still believable. The human experience, however, still cries out for some other explanation of this experience. What is it?

We are self-conscious creatures. All living things are survival oriented. Plants stretch to receive the light of the sun in order to live. Animals fight for life or flee danger in order to survive. Neither plant life nor animal life, however, is aware of its survival drive. Human beings are. When self-conscious creatures make their own survival their highest goal, they then organize their world around that need. That is what makes human life inevitably and universally self-centered, separated and cut off from others. We are our own worst enemy and we do violence to others in our drive to survive. This is not, however, because we have fallen into sin, as religious people still operating in a Pauline context continue to assert; it arises directly out of the given nature of our biological life. As still incomplete, evolving creatures we do not need to be "saved," we need rather to be lifted to a new level of humanity, a new level of consciousness where we can live for others, give ourselves away in love for others and be empowered to become all that each of us can be. This is what salvation means. This is what Paul experienced in Jesus, but he was trapped inside the presuppositions of his first century, Jewish view of human life. He found in Jesus the power to accept himself, to love himself and to become himself. "Nothing," he said, "nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus." Paul's experience of human life was correct. His explanation was wrong. His experience of Christ as life-giving love was correct. His explanation of how that love was manifested in Jesus' life was wrong.

Next week, we will push this study of Romans to a new place and seek to translate Paul's experience into our presuppositions. I hope you will join us then.

You say that all societies have or have had a word or concept meaning God. Is this true of Buddhism? I know that Buddhas have been deeply revered, but not that they were equated with God. So my question is, does Buddhism really necessitate a belief in or a word for God?

Dear Sara,

Your letter reflects an important understanding and also makes a common fallacy. The important understanding comes in the universal realization that all human beings postulate a realm beyond and greater than the realm of the human. That is what self-consciousness does to each one of us. The common fallacy is that there is only one human definition of that meaning.

Western religion has regularly and consistently defined God in theistic terms. That is, God is perceived as an external being, supernatural in power, who periodically invades the world in miraculous ways to establish the divine will or to answer our prayers. Eastern religion in general, but Buddhism in particular, does not define God in theistic terms. That has caused some westerners to refer to Buddhism as an "atheist" religion. Well, it is, but only in the sense that "atheist" means "not theist." It does not mean that there is no sense of God in Buddhism. Language is our problem. The theistic definition of God is so total in the western world that the word "atheism" has come to mean that there is no God. Theism is a human definition of God and, as such, is destined to die like all human definitions do in time. Theism is not God.

The second point of your question makes it clear that this common fallacy is operating. You are correct in that no claim is present in Buddhism that suggests that the Buddhas be equated with God. If God is not external to life as theism projects, then God cannot invade the world in human form. That is an idea that grew up in Christianity and, in my mind, still distorts the meaning of Jesus. The early Christian writings suggest that God — the Holy external other — designated Jesus to be "son of God." That designation took place at his resurrection for Paul, as he writes in his letter to the Romans about the year 58. It took place at his baptism for Mark, who writes his gospel in the early 70's. The literal identity between Jesus and God that brought about such doctrines as the Incarnation and the Trinity are the products of the next three hundred years, and are based on what I regard as a Greek misreading of the Fourth Gospel. The claim of divinity for Jesus, or the suggestion that he is the second person of the Trinity, is unique to later Christianity. The Jews never claimed a divine nature for Judaism's greatest heroes, Moses and Elijah; the Buddhists never made that claim for Buddha, and Islam never made that claim for Mohammed. That is not to say, however, that these religions do not have a profound sense of the holy for which the word God is the most popular human symbol.

I have moved theologically over the course of my life into a non-theistic understanding of God. That does not mean that God has become less real to me. Indeed the exact opposite is the case. When I speak about God I embrace the fact that I am only using words as symbols that describe not God, but my experience of God. I experience God as the source of life, the source of love and the ground of being. I see the divinity of Jesus in the fullness of his humanity. I believe the way into God is to journey into, through and beyond the human. While the pathway might look different, the goal is quite the same.

Thank you for your question.