Category Archives: Past as Prologue to Future

Christendom is Dead

Mohandas Gandhi, leader of the movement in India in the mid-twentieth century to gain independence from Great Britain, is reported to have said, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” Some suggest that Gandhi leaned toward Christianity for himself but changed his mind after observing Christians.

Christianity is alive and well, growing mightily in certain regions of the globe and even among some groups where it was supposed to be buried. Christendom, however, that European-centered common culture that Gandhi probably knew, began dying several hundred years ago. Gandhi’s words hint at the reasons.

The European church in the Middle Ages became increasingly corrupt and power hungry. Those who wanted to purify the church or who believed that the common person had the right to read the Bible in his or her own language were persecuted.

Then the Reformation movements of the 1500’s gave promise of a revival of Christianity in Europe. Instead, that promise was eclipsed by the religious wars that followed. In the name of religion, conflicts killed thousands, led to massive refugee flows, and devastated parts of Europe. Not surprisingly, some began to see religion as the problem and to search for other ways of ordering society.

As Europeans gained world power, they too often exploited native peoples in other regions, as in India. Their practices lessened the impact of Christians who came as missionaries, not conquerors.

We Christians sometimes act as though the truths of our faith are self-evident and that people who disagree with us are either idiots or morally deficient. We have to learn anew that the way we live carries more influence than our words.

 

Wisdom and Information Overload

In the 1990’s my husband and I traveled through what was formerly East Germany, unified a few years before with West Germany to form a new country. We saw remains of the infamous Berlin Wall, where guards shot those who ventured to flee the East German dictatorship. In the bustling, modern German state, the idea of a government that sought such control over its citizens now appeared quaint and old-fashioned.

I’m reminded of that day when I watch news about the beleaguered country of Syria. The government of Bashar al-Assad seems stuck in the old ways: iron control, no self-determination, no free flow of information.

In the days of the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union, the United States penetrated the “Iron Curtain” that surrounded Soviet countries with radio programs. People in Soviet countries listened to clandestine radios and hoped no government spies would report them to authorities. Radio information punched the first holes in the Iron Curtain.

The new fax machines in the 1980’s meant one could send documents instantly to another person thousands of miles away. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Boris Yeltsin led a new Russian government, beset with problems but more democratic than the Soviet model. Supporters of the old style autocracy attempted a coup to reverse the process. The coup attempt was defeated, partly because the supporters of Yeltsin were able to communicate by fax.

Fax machines were joined by email and email by cell phones and texting and the new phenomena we call social media. The story is told again and again of the role these new forms of communication now play in the toppling of dictatorships.

Information provides fuel for change, but information is not wisdom. Information may tear down, but only wisdom can build. Wisdom has to do with values and sometimes hard choices after the shouting has faded.

 

An Age of Doubt? Call It Opportunity

I turned on the car radio when I traveled as a historic preservation planner during that autumn of 1989. The broadcasts crackled with stories of nations tottering out of communism toward—we weren’t sure what. Eventually the Soviet Union split into separate nations: Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, Kazakstan, and a host of others. The Berlin Wall collapsed.

We who had lived with the threat of a third world war between the U.S. and communist countries could hardly believe it. Some talked of a peace dividend. Now, they said, we could use resources committed to the Cold War for domestic needs: schools, infrastructure, and investment in alternate energy to lesson our dependence on foreign oil.

Those days of hope collapsed with the Twin Towers on 9/ll. Today we live in age of doubt. We disagree in uncivil terms on where we as a nation are headed. We Christians have been rattled by the “new” atheism and declining numbers in some of our churches.

Yet a time similar to this one—the Renaissance—spawned the religious movement called the Reformation.

(more on these two movements)

The secular Renaissance overturned previous notions, disturbing the religious hierarchy. By doing so, it cleared the way for radical changes like freedom of religion and renewed faith communities and missionary movements.

We should resist the temptation of an ill-conceived attempt to return to a perceived golden age of “Christian” America. If Christian beliefs were more prominent in days gone by, it is because significant numbers of Americans thought Christianity made sense. If Christian beliefs are not taken seriously by a majority today, railing against unbelief will change few people’s perceptions.

Better to find God’s leadership toward new and renewed expressions of our faith or better yet to new examples of that faith.

 

Baseball Teams and Nations

A baseball team is more likely to win when its members seek the goals of the group before their own. For a nation to be successful, a significant number of citizens must seek the common good above their individual interests.

When citizens believe their country is in peril, they sometimes sacrifice a great deal for its survival, as Americans did during the Second World War. Things fall apart when a shared dream dies.

When elite groups choose to gather riches and power for themselves through corrupt or merely selfish practices, ordinary citizens begin to question the justness and fairness of the system. Communist movements grew in the United States in the 1930’s during the Great Depression, when unemployment resulted in growing poverty and despair.

Communism ceased to be attractive to most Americans during and after the Second World War. Jobs and prosperity returned. Higher education became possible for more Americans through programs for returning GI’s and others that made such education affordable for ordinary citizens. Most believed in the American dream, that if they worked hard and lived decent lives, they would be rewarded with a good life.

Perhaps hope is the most important ingredient of successful baseball teams and nations, the reason their members sacrifice for them.

 

Christianity’s Success: A Problem?

C.S. Lewis mentioned in his autobiography, Surprised By Joy, how his early life at a “vile” boarding school prepared him for real life. It taught him, he said, to live by hope. At school, hope of the holidays sustained him. During holidays, however, the knowledge that even the best of vacations must end, prepared him for not accepting present situations, even favorable ones, at face value.

Dark times can include seeds of victory and success may hint of struggles to come.

When Christianity at first was rejected by religious leaders and persecuted by secular ones, it grew mightily. When finally it found success and even power as it joined with worldly governments, it suffered from schisms and disharmony. Then Muslims conquered much of the lands that had spawned Christianity. Turks overthrew the last of the Byzantine Empire, and a reduced Christianity was left to the backwaters of a primitive Europe.

Christian leaders developed, and the new printing press spread their ideas. Christianity prospered, increasing the faith of many and bringing deeper understanding. Then adherents of various religious movements tied it to political alliances. Their actions contributed to a lessening of Christian influence and to the rationalism of the eighteenth century in the Western world.

Christianity revived in the nineteenth century and became even more influential, leading directly or indirectly to the abolishment of slavery, the improvement of women’s status, and various programs to alleviate the sufferings of the poor.

It was popular to be a Christian, and Christianity was carried to vast reaches of the world as Europe and America, the “West,” became dominant.

Now we are inheritors of that time and are surprised to find that Christianity has lost its primary position in the West. In truth, Christianity is always carried out by a remnant living within the world. When the influence of that remnant is great, Christian principles weave into our laws and our ways of life. Success, however, brings the temptation to ally with Caesar and Mammon— power and wealth. That alliance may injure us. We must again earn the right to be taken seriously.

 

The Best Laid Plans …

The North African nation of Algeria is one of the nations in the news because of the “Arab spring.” This is the name for the demonstrations against autocratic regimes in the Middle East and North Africa that began with Tunisia and Egypt earlier this year and has rocked Libya.

This is not the first time Algerians have struggled for more control over their own destiny. Algeria was a part of France until the Algerians fought a bloody revolution and became independent in 1962. The Algerians believed that with self-government, they would do great things. This appeared so at first. Algeria was a leader of non-aligned nations during the time of the Cold War between Communist and non-Communist nations. After American embassy hostages were taken by Iranian extremists over three decades ago, they were finally released to the neutral nation of Algeria in the dramatic last days of Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

Unfortunately, Algeria has since fallen into corruption and insurgency. The people who led its revolution proved unable to give up power when Algerians voted for others. History is littered with such tragedies, like Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

When we are given power, we slip easily into the temptation to believe that we have all the answers. We begin with the best of intentions. We are certain that we know better than those who disagree with us. Until we understand that it isn’t “us” against “them,” but rather that “we” are all finite humans, we will make little progress. Always, the gift of power is given temporarily to use in service to all.

When we seek to circumvent the rights of others in order to force our own agenda, we risk being corrupted by our power. Better if we seek to influence rather than to force. Better to listen to all, form a consensus, build a structure that includes investment from as many as possible, not one that can’t support noble aims because its foundation is not broad enough to support the whole.

Many of the Arab nations are struggling against regimes that never learned this lesson. Let us hope and pray for a better outcome this time.

 

Abide or Dominate?

When we Christians tie ourselves to any other than Jesus, the church suffers. When we tie ourselves, like so much of the world, to power and wealth and domination, Christianity suffers. Some force— the barbarian invasions of late antiquity, Muslims, Turks, the Enlightenment, and now, the “new atheism”—arises to contend with us and turn us into a remnant.

Jesus didn’t play power politics. He accepted death rather than raise an army and become another Caesar. When he made that final decision to die rather than do so, he told his disciples, “Abide in me.”
Christianity over the centuries has waxed and waned according to how seriously his followers have done that.

 

Remnant and Renewal

My sojourn in the North African nations of Algeria and Tunisia awakened an interest in Christian history. Why, I wondered, did Christianity fade from these regions where it grew so strongly in the early days of Christianity, where the church fathers once taught?

I visited ruins of ancient churches and pondered lines from a book I read: “The burden of history weighs . . . on remnant communities. What happened to their glory? Why was the good fight lost? Who were the strong of faith? Who were the weak? . . . Deserted cathedrals, abandoned monasteries, and a scattering of Christian villages in lands that were once the center of Christendom . . .” ( From an essay by Richard Bulliet in Conversion and Christianity, a collection of essays on Christian communities in early Islamic times, edited by Michael Gervers and Ramzi Jibran Bikhazi.)

The practice of Christianity for many Christians in these lands, even before the Muslim conquest, had become merely a cultural thing, a recognition of the state religion that Christianity had become. The eastern Roman empire (the one we call Byzantium) had amassed wealth and power, and these became the goals of its political and commercial leaders. Then Byzantium was vanquished by Islam, and Christianity declined in the lands which birthed it. From North Africa west of Egypt, it withered and disappeared. In Europe, however, a backwater of the world at that time, it matured.

Perhaps Christianity is always rising, falling, rising again, a picture of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.

Perhaps God cuts off his people when they move too far away from him, then gives his favor to more humble believers.

 

Transformation

A current theory is that religion is the cause of war, murder, terrorism, and the general nastiness that afflicts us.

The truth is, humans have treated each other badly since the beginning of recorded history, with or without religion. In the past, greed and the desire for wealth and power did not have to be explained. People wanted other people’s land, riches, or other possessions and if they were powerful enough, they took them. If you had a god, this proved your god was more powerful than your neighbor’s.

In the beginning, the Hebrews weren’t that different from other tribes around them. However, a new song echoed from the prophets. It was the idea that God favored, not the rich and powerful, but the dispossessed, the marginalized, the widows and orphans. These were to be protected and given a chance, not exploited.

Then Christians further revolutionized this idea. God came as Jesus, they said, not only to show us the way, but to give us the power to live this new way. Finally we have hope that we can be transformed from the old nature that desires to dominate and take. Of course, as Jesus said, calling oneself a Christian is not enough. What one does is the proof that one has or has not accepted transformation..

 

The Idea of Jubilee at Christmas

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Suppose Christians celebrated Christmas like a Biblical time of Jubilee?

Most of us give to some charity or other at Christmas. Suppose we, perhaps gradually over the next few years, decrease the amount of giving to ourselves and families and friends and give more to the causes outside ourselves that turn us on? Those that inspire us with the ideal of changing humankind through a meeting of physical and spiritual needs.

We hear the old refrain each time at Christmas about too much materialism and the ignoring of the real “reason for the season.” Only, since retailers depend on the holidays for as much as a third of their selling, wouldn’t the economy wreck (further) if we stopped our Christmas splurges? We don’t want to increase our country’s economic woes do we?’

According to economists, the poor and less well-off must spend every bit of money that comes their way. So what we give to the poor is more likely to wend its way into the economy of the country, it seems to me. A true stimulus package. Likewise, the help we give the spiritually needy may reap dividends if they become more useful members of society.

Christmas, a time of Jubilee

 

Renaissance, Reformation, and New Atheism

Secularism is today’s Renaissance. The first Renaissance, which brought the European Middle Ages to a close, moved man into the center in place of God. The challenge of the Renaissance led to the Reformation of the 1500’s in the Christian church. Those of us who remain in that church, formerly identified as “Christendom,” struggle toward a new Reformation in response to the challenge of secularism.

I remember a course in my college days, Renaissance and Reformation. We studied the two movements together. The Renaissance began, so we learned, in Italy in the 1300’s. The Reformation began later. The watershed year was 1517, when Martin Luther nailed the famous Ninety-Five Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany.

Why was the Renaissance first? Did most Christians accept the excesses of their church in the late Middle Ages as okay? Accept them because they were afraid if they messed with the church they were going against God? Worshiped the church as God?

Reformers worked before the Reformation, men such as John Wycliffe in England and John Hus in Bohemia. Monastic movements like the one led by Francis of Assisi called Christians to a simpler religious practice. Spiritual and secular leaders were aware of wrongs within the church during the 1200’s and before, but it took the challenge of the Renaissance and new inventions like the printing press (a revolution akin to today’s Internet) to create the Reformation.

Who knows? Today’s New Atheism might challenge Christians toward a rediscovery of their faith. Emergent churches, contemporary churches, and those movements in Africa, Asia, and South America indicate that Christianity is thriving, seething, roiling.

Perhaps we do not recognize the new wineskins into which it has been poured.

 

The Tension Between Jamestown and Plymouth

The earliest permanent English settlements in what was to become the United States gave us two skeins that twist together throughout our history. The settlers of Jamestown, begun in 1607, by and large wanted to reap the riches of the new world. The Plymouth colonists, settling in 1620, for the most part hoped for a more spiritual harvest. Both included the wise and the foolish, the selfish and the generous.

The Jamestown settlers found that one did not reap riches as automatically as they envisioned. They went through a starving time as the wilderness taught its own brutal lessons. Eventually, the colonists began importing slaves, a practice that haunts us to this day. One can see the seeds of slavery—the desire to want wealth so much as to enslave fellow humans to obtain it for their masters—in the Jamestown settlement. Tobacco would became a cash crop, a crop which has no real value in meeting human need but requires intense labor.

This early settlement became Virginia and gave us founding fathers like George Washington, who courageously led us to victory in the war for American independence, and Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence. This document declared that all men were created equal, but both Washington and Jefferson owned slaves.

The Plymouth story has been told so many times that it has become a caricature of its original. We have gone from hero worship of the sober pilgrims to outright scorn, reminded today of the white man’s selfish exploitation of the native American. The New England Puritans have a bad reputation: forbidding games, requiring a tedious Sabbath, finally, burning women they claimed were witches.

Neither Jamestown nor Plymouth was an Eden on earth, but the coming to America of religious refugees, which the pilgrims were, foretold a nation which would grow strong by accepting “the wretched refuse” of the old world and giving these castoffs opportunity. New England, with all its faults, developed some of the greatest institutions of higher learning in the world. New England also was a seed bed for the movement to abolish slavery.

The strands of Jamestown and Plymouth are woven together in our history, from the hurts of raw greed  to the altruistic impulses that guide our attempts to help others.

We still make those choices today

 

Taxation with Representation

The young George Washington led a troop of American colonists to war in the mid 1750’s.  No, this was not the American Revolution. The Revolution would be fought more than twenty years later. The Americans weren’t fighting against the British but with them. They supported British operations to defeat the French for control of North America in the conflict known as the French and Indian War. Americans, many of British descent, preferred British rule rather than French. The British/American efforts were successful, and the American colonists remained under the British, as was their wish.

Wars must be paid for. Protecting an empire doesn’t come cheap. At the end of the war, the British empire was one of the largest in the world, but also had one of the largest debts, about half of which was incurred in defense of the American colonies. The British government passed certain measures to raise taxes and pay off the debt, including a tax on tea. Certain American leaders pointed out that Americans had no representation in the British Parliament that decided on those taxes. Differences led to the American Revolution, with its rallying cry “no taxation without representation.”

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Americans, through their representatives in Congress, voted to reduce taxes. Shortly afterward, terrorists launched the World Trade Center attacks. Americans strongly supported military action to deal with the terrorists.

The time arrived to pay for the actions against terrorists, as well as for programs like Social Security, Medicare, and the replacement of the country’s aging bridges and highways. Americans made their displeasure felt against any restoration of taxes. It seems we don’t like taxation with representation anymore than we do taxation without representation. This appears to be true even if the taxes are for the support of programs we have voted for through our elected representatives and that are quite popular.

 

Religion and Conflict

The belief is common that religion is the main cause of wars and conflicts. Didn’t religion cause 9/11, leading to the Afghan and Iraqi wars? What about the Crusades? The Palestinian/Israeli conflict? Strife between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland?

Studying history, I doubt religion has been the main cause of conflicts. I don’t think the Romans conquered the Mediterranean basin to spread the religion of Jupiter. Surely the movement of the Germanic peoples against the Roman Empire wasn’t any desire to inflict Woden on others nor the appearance of the Huns an attempt to spread their religious beliefs.

Most struggles throughout history, from Asia to Africa to South America and Europe had to do with the desire for territory and wealth and control. In World Wars I and II, coalitions fought over land and empire. Even recent and current conflicts in the Middle East continue more for reasons of security, ethnicity, and control for one’s tribal space than for actual religious beliefs, couched though the conflicts might be in religious terms.

The Crusades of the Middle Ages are often cited as Christianity against Islam. Religious elements certainly were involved, and some did join the Crusades from religious zeal. However, the desire for wealth and power probably propelled more of the participants. Likewise the spread of Islam throughout formerly “Christian” lands.

Certainly the Crusades would be judged evil by the founder of Christianity. Jesus would not allow his disciples to take swords in his defense. Would such a person approve the Crusades?

The enlightenment era of early modern times often is cited as rationalism overcoming religious superstition. Its advocates say scientific advances have benefited humankind more than any movement before it.

That science has benefited us surely no one denies. Yet, the Holocaust happened in Germany, a nation that accepted the enlightenment as deeply as any nation. Britain spawned Methodism and influenced the western world to abolish slavery.

 

Ruins and Renewal

Tunisia, where I lived for three years, is full of Roman ruins. A small country in North Africa, Tunisia is home to the site of ancient Carthage. Throughout millennia, Phoenicians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Turks, and French arrived, conquered for a while, and left their imprint. One gains the impression that every stone in the country has been used many times over for the buildings of each civilization. The Roman ones, however, are especially impressive.

Many of the church fathers, Augustine among them, at one time lived in Carthage and other parts of North Africa. Augustine wrote his famous City of God while serving as bishop of Hippo in what is now Algeria, a neighbor to Tunisia. He died there as barbarian Vandals besieged his city, harbinger of yet another conqueror.

Tunisia has a long history both of Rome’s rule and early Christian communities. Drive up into the hills of northern Tunisia and you will see the ruins of both. Visit Dugga, a Roman town. You can wander on the paved streets, study mosaics still visible in villas of rich Romans, and marvel at the still magnificent walls of temples to various Roman deities. On a little hillside of the town are the ruins of an early Christian church.

Neither the Roman temples nor the Christian church have adherents today. Shepherds herd their sheep through the ruins. Wind whistles around the fallen stones of temples and church alike.

Wandering through the site, I wondered when the last Christian had worshiped in the little church. Christianity disappeared from North Africa, except for Egypt, sometime during Europe’s Middle Ages. As one author put it, the descendants of the Christians now are Muslims.

At its beginning, Christianity passed from Jerusalem to the rest of the Roman Empire, to Europe and Russia, even China, finally to North and South America and Australia and the uttermost parts of the earth. Along the way, however, it receded in some regions, including the region which birthed it.

Christendom’s long reign in Europe appears to be over. Though the great cathedrals are not yet ruins, they no longer appear centers of a vibrant faith.

In North America, Christianity has lost much of its influence. The nonreligious segment of the population appears to be the fastest growing. The center of Christianity heads southward to Africa and South America and eastward to Asia.

Over time, the cultural Christians of North Africa left the religion of their ancestors and joined the dominant Muslim religion. So, too, may the cultural Christians of North America join the dominant religion of the “nonreligious,” unless Christians create true resurrection communities. True Christians are subversives in any culture of materialism and self-aggrandizement.