Entries from August 2008 ↓

Mollie Z. Hemingway, reporting on the Democratic convention’s interfaith service, usefully sums up the liturgy, structure, and meaning of interfaith services:

Interfaith worship services usually follow a Judeo-Christian liturgy but with the insertion of other Scriptures and clergy. So instead of a procession of clergy behind, say, a crucifix, the clergy were led by four Native Americans beating drums.

Rather than a reading from the Old Testament, the Psalms, the New Testament, and a Gospel — as you would hear in a liturgical Christian service — there were readings from the Torah, the Sutra Nipata, the Koran, and more from the Old Testament. No New Testament. It is unsurprising that no reading contained a claim of exclusivity or, for that matter, any claim that adherents of a different religion would disagree with. Rather than using proper names to refer to prophets or deities, clergy tend to overload on pronouns and non-descript names. “Lord,” rather than “Jesus.” “The God of Leviticus” becomes “Holy One of Blessing.”

We’ve discussed “house churches” and “home churches.” They are the fruit of the notion that “everyone is a minister” and that therefore we don’t need pastors. Then follows the conviction that we do not need denominations, theology, “organized religion,” or the church at all.

Michael Horton has a brilliant article in “Modern Reformation” about contemporary Christians who believe that they do not need the church. Excerpts:

In a fairly recent study, Willow Creek-a pioneer megachurch-discovered that its most active and mature members are the most likely to be dissatisfied with their own personal growth and the level of teaching and worship that they are receiving. From this, the leadership concluded that as people mature in their faith, they need the church less. After all, the main purpose of the church is to provide a platform for ministry and service opportunities to individuals rather than a means of grace. As people grow, therefore, they need the church less. We need to help believers to become “self-feeders,” the study concluded.

How far can this trajectory take us? Evangelical marketer George Barna gives us a good indication. Like the recent Willow Creek study, Barna concludes that what individual believers do on their own is more important than what the church does for them. Barna, however, takes Finney’s legacy to the next logical step. A leading marketing consultant to megachurches as well as the Disney Corporation, he has recently gone so far as to suggest that the days of the institutional church are over. Barna celebrates a rising demographic of what he calls “Revolutionaries”-”millions of believers” who “have moved beyond the established church and chosen to be the church instead.” Since “being the church” is a matter of individual choice and effort, all people need are resources for their own work of personal and social transformation. “Based on our research,” Barna relates, “I have projected that by the year 2010, 10 to 20 percent of Americans will derive all their spiritual input (and output) through the Internet.” Who needs the church when you have an iPod? Like any service provider, the church needs to figure out what business it’s in, says Barna:

“Ours is not the business of organized religion, corporate worship, or Bible teaching. If we dedicate ourselves to such a business we will be left by the wayside as the culture moves forward. Those are fragments of a larger purpose to which we have been called by God’s Word. We are in the business of life transformation.”

Of course, Barna does not believe that Christians should abandon all religious practices, but the only ones he still thinks are essential are those that can be done by individuals in private, or at most in families or informal public gatherings. But by eliminating the public means of grace, Barna (like Willow Creek) directs us away from God’s lavish feast to a self-serve buffet.

The Democrats began their convention with an interfaith service:

At the first official event Sunday of the Democratic National Convention, a choir belted out a gospel song and was followed by a rabbi reciting a Torah reading about forgiveness and the future.

Helen Prejean, the Catholic nun who wrote “Dead Man Walking,” assailed the death penalty and the use of torture.

Young Muslim women in headscarves sat near older African-American women in their finest Sunday hats.

Four years ago, such a scene would have been unthinkable at a Democratic National Convention. In 2004, there was one interfaith lunch at the Democratic gala in Boston.

But that same year, “values voters” helped re-elect President Bush, giving Democrats of faith the opening they needed to make party leaders listen to them.

The result was on display at Sunday’s interfaith service, staged in a theater inside the Colorado Convention Center, and will be evident throughout the convention agenda and on the sidelines.

There will be four “faith caucus” meetings, blessings to open and close each night, and panels and parties run by Democratic-leaning religious advocacy groups that didn’t even exist in 2004 — not to mention protests from religious groups and leaders opposed to the Democratic platform.

Other challenges may come from within. At Sunday’s service, Bishop Charles Blake, head of the predominantly black Church of God in Christ and a self-described pro-life Democrat, said Barack Obama should be pressed to “elaborate upon his stated intention to reduce the number of abortions by providing alternative programs.”

One hallmark of Democratic faith efforts at the convention is diversity, which might soften objections from party activists wary of the Christian right or any mixing of religion and politics. . . . “If we create or become a mirror image of the religious right, we have failed,” said Burns Strider, who ran religious outreach for Hillary Clinton’s campaign and now does faith-based political consulting. “But if we have increased the number of chairs around the table, … then we’ve succeeded.”

Mollie Z. Hemingway was there and she reports the details, including the main sermon by a nun who claimed that if God allowed His Son to be sacrificed for the sins of the world, He would be an “ogre.”

The quotation: “She challenged them about the Christian account that God allowed his son to be sacrificed for the sins of humanity. ‘Is this a God or is this an ogre?’”

Plan Would Protect Health-Care Workers Who Object to Abortion:

The Bush administration. . . announced plans to implement a controversial regulation designed to protect doctors, nurses and other health-care workers who object to abortion from being forced to deliver services that violate their personal beliefs.

The rule empowers federal health officials to pull funding from more than 584,000 hospitals, clinics, health plans, doctors’ offices and other entities if they do not accommodate employees who refuse to participate in care they find objectionable on personal, moral or religious grounds.

“People should not be forced to say or do things they believe are morally wrong,” Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said. “Health-care workers should not be forced to provide services that violate their violates their own conscience.”

The proposed regulation, which could go into effect after a 30-day comment period, was welcomed by conservative groups, abortion opponents and others as necessary to safeguard workers from being fired, disciplined or penalized in other ways. Women’s health advocates, family planning advocates, abortion rights activists and others, however, condemned the regulation, saying it could create sweeping obstacles to a variety of health services, including abortion, family planning, end-of-life care and possibly a wide range of scientific research.

Will you watch the political conventions? They used to be working groups, passing resolutions, forming coalitions, and making meaningful votes on the candidates. Now they have become just coronations and propaganda forums. There used to at least be the suspense of who the Vice Presidential nominee would be, but now even that is pre-decided. Still, I have the habit, engrained from childhood, of tuning in.

Here is a useful guide to the mini-dramas that will unfold at theDemocratic convention that opens today.

The publishing house Thomas Nelson is coming out with The Chronological Study Bible, which not re-arranges not only the books but their passages (including the Psalms) to put everything in chronological order.

My impression is that even conservative Bible scholars are not fully agreed on when the different books of the Bible were written. In any event, looking at it from a literary perspective, this would seem to break up the unity of particular books. But do you see a value in this? And, theologically, is there a significance to the order of the canon?

The challenges Barack Obama will find in campaigning with his vice-presidential pick are detailed here. Briefly, there is his track record of plagiarism; his tendency to bloviate; and his almost humorously proclivity for gaffes (praising Obama as a black man who is “clean”; bragging about how high his IQ is; etc.).

I did catch some of the closing ceremony. Just as China seems to have forged a new kind of communism, it seems to have forged a new kind of communist artistic style. Before, the only style allowed in Marxist regimes was socialist realism. Now we seem to have socialist fantasy.

Socialist realism had to consist of character types, with evil capitalists and a ridiculous and sinister middle class (still a Hollywood staple!), opposed by muscular workers and large groups of the noble proletariat. Based on what I saw at both the Olympic ceremonies, which would have to have been party-approved, this new style still rejects individualism, which would still be bourgeois and counter-revolutionary, and is highly collective.

We still see nothing but groups and individuals, all alike, taking their place in the groups. But this socialist fantasy–as we see in those lit up figures flying around–is fanciful and future-oriented. It is built around mass unity, rather than class conflict. It emphasizes wealth to the point of conspicuous consumption, though it is national wealth rather than anything that belongs to individuals.

This kind of communism, I suspect, will prove far more formidable–and appealing–than the old.

Here is an incomplete, sometimes tongue-in-cheek list of highs and lows at the Beijing Olympics. Do you have any final thoughts as they pass into history?

So, Barack Obama has picked Senator Joe Biden as his Vice Presidential running mate. Thoughts? I’d like to hear from both fans and foes of Obama.

(A rare Saturday post)

Maybe there is something to the Mowgli/Romulus/Remus legend. SeeFemale dog rescues abandoned baby, takes child with her puppies:

A female dog found an abandoned newborn baby girl early Thursday and took the child home with her puppies in a poor suburb of the Argentine city of La Plata, local media reported citing police sources.

The owner of the dog reportedly noticed the baby hours later, when he heard her cry. The man immediately called the police, and the newborn was taken to a hospital in La Plata.
The dog, called China, reportedly found the baby in a barren lot in the neighbourhood of Abasto. Guided by her instinct, she took the girl with her puppies and kept her warm in the Argentine winter.

Couple this with new studies that show what we all knew already, that humans and dogs do communicate with each other–we can correctly interpret what the different barks mean, from happy barks to angry barks–and that, according to this article, “Dogs are becoming more intelligent and are even learning morals from human contact.”

So I guess this opens up a thread for dog stories. Do any of you have any examples and personal experiences of this sort of thing with your dog? And do attributes such as dog intelligence, dog communication, and dog morals pose any theological difficulties?

Update to our discussion about whether the Chinese gymnasts are really 16, as the rules require: International Olympic Committee launches probe into He Kexin’s age. Can you imagine China’s response if the committee strips those little girls of their medals? The loss of face? The spoiling of their nearly-perfect and self-esteem boosting Olympics? The emotionalism and defensiveness from their wounded pride could make Russia’s recent sabre-rattling seem inconsequential.