Couldn't Help Noticing

Talk about the teddy

(From Mark Greene from the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity.)

A pope gives a lecture in Europe and nuns are murdered in Ethiopia. A writer publishes a novel and is forced into hiding. A teacher allows her class to name a teddy bear after a popular pupil and a crowd call for her death.

To its credit, the Muslim Council of Britain was swift to distance itself from the actions of the Sudanese police. But, sadly, for most people in Britain, this new development only reinforces the growing perception of Islam as a repressive, violent faith. Perhaps even more damaging, it makes ordinary non-Muslims very wary of saying anything at all about Islam. Fear increasingly stifles comment, debate, and even everyday conversation at school gates and in classrooms and workplaces.

That can easily drive a wedge between Muslims and the rest of the community: how do you develop friendships when the conversational field is so full of mines? Nevertheless, as Christians we cannot allow fear to create barriers between our Muslim neighbours and ourselves.

Whatever the solutions on the global stage, there is at least one vital way forward in everyday life. We must normalize conversation about Islam, about Muhammad and about the Qur'an. And we must do it at school gates and in classrooms and workplaces. It's time to ask our Muslim neighbours and colleagues and fellow students: “What do you think about Muhammad the teddy?” “What does it feel like for Muslims when such stories fill the media?”

It's time to ask them what they love about their faith. “I am so thankful to Allah, so thankful to him,” a Manchester cabby told me two weeks ago.

It's also time to share with our Muslim neighbours what we believe—that we are so thankful that Jesus loved us so much that he died on the cross; that we are thankful for his wondrous word and the guiding, strengthening, moment by moment reality of his Spirit; and that we wish that the Sudanese had reacted to a (well-intentioned) teacher in the same way Jesus reacted to his mockers and murderers: “Father, forgive her, she didn't know what she was doing” (cf. Luke 23:24).

Still, in an atmosphere of fear and distrust, we will need more than courage. Courage doesn't drive out fear; it merely manages it. It is only love—the perfect love of God—that drives out fear (1 John 4:18). We are called to love our neighbours not because we have special courage, but because Christ’s love flows through us. How will we act to ensure that our Muslim neighbours experience this love, today and every other day?

©LICC http://www.licc.org.uk/. Reproduced with permission.

Golden opportunity

As one might almost have predicted, Albert Mohler has posted an excellent analysis of The Golden Compass controversy.

He argues that, yes, the movie is every bit as subversive of Christianity as you have heard, and that, yes, this is certainly the agenda of the author, Philip Pullman, and that it comes out particularly strongly as the trilogy unfolds.

However, Dr Mohler wisely suggests that boycotts and protests are not the best response. Instead, he regards the release of The Golden Compass as a golden opportunity for the battle of worldviews to be joined. He suggests we use the movie's release as an occasion for vigorous engagement and for talking about these big issues—with our children, and with our neighbours and friends.

Pullman's trilogy has already joined the honour roll of recent anti-Christian bestsellers (think The Da Vinci Code, The God Delusion and God is not Great). Personally, I think this trend is a promising development. It is much better to be attacked than ignored—to be on the agenda of public debate than to be marginalized.

And besides, according to Jesus, it is a blessing and a joy to be attacked and ridiculed on account of his name.

(Editor's note: The Golden Compass has just been released in the US. It has also been shown at preview screenings in Australia. Discerning CHN readers may like to check out some of the reviews in SydneyAnglicans.net, Christianity Today, Salon.com and The New York Times.)

Pick your poison

(Editor's note: One year out from the US presidential elections, there has been much speculation in the media and on various blogs about each of the candidates. Marty Sweeney, our American correspondent, gives us his take on one of the Christian candidates.)

The Republican Party—the party of which President George Bush is a member—is in trouble: they are entering an election year with no clear-cut favorite to take on likely opponent Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Presidential election.

For months, most presumed that former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani would win the Republican nomination. But there were always grumblings from the Republican base (i.e. Christian conservatives) because Giuliani is rather liberal in his social views. He is not as staunchly set against abortion and gay rights as some Christians would like. Furthermore, he is onto his third wife, and appears to profess no deep-rooted conviction about Christ. However, he is supported mainly because of his strong stance against taxes, big government and terrorism.

Recently, a surge in the polls by former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee has caused excitement in some evangelical circles. Governing over the same state as Bill Clinton did, he has emerged as a kind of anti-Clinton. He is a former Baptist preacher who professes a sincere faith in Christ, and who has, from what we know, been a faithful father and husband all his life. He is pro-family, pro-life and pro just about anything else Christian voters like their candidates to be for. The pundits have labeled Huckabee as the only ‘valid’ Christian in the Republican race.

The other day as I was flipping TV channels to the morning sports news, I came across Huckabee's face on a show I had never watched before. He was sitting at a table, chatting with someone about the usual political issues of the moment. As the camera panned back, I was surprised to find that his table mate was Kenneth Copeland. Yes, Kenneth Copeland, the noted televangelist and word-of-faith preacher. I later found out that this had not been a one-time visit; Copeland and Huckabee are reportedly close friends.

I have not heard or read about too many rumblings within the evangelical camp about this association. One reason for this could be that a large number of charismatic and prosperity-gospel Christians are counted as part of this all-encompassing political grouping known as ‘Evangelicals’, and thus have no problem with this association. Another reason could be that disgruntled evangelicals are not quite sure what to do. The lack of excitement over Giuliani is largely due to his lack of Christian faith and values. Huckabee shines brightly in this role. But what about those evangelicals who think that Copeland is a false teacher (or, at least, a terribly deficient teacher)? Would you rather have a seemingly sincere professing Christian who may believe in the false prosperity gospel and a mystical ‘power of faith’ (Huckabee), or a guy who is dead-on with his fiscal and foreign policy views, but who may be no Christian at all (Giuliani)?

Stay tuned ...

Death and mortality: shortened thoughts from Mark Baddeley

Mark Baddeley, a regular Briefing contributor, has started a most excellent blog, but it's really only people like Briefing editors that have the time to sit around all day reading such magical stuff. So, for the non-bloggerati out there who want to suck the juice of deep thought from the mind of Baddeley without actually reading (much), here are a few choice quotes from a recent post. The question of the day is whether or not the death of humans is part of the created order.

Now, you don't need to hear options 1 and 2 as they don't actually match reality. But here we join Mark at option 3:

Third, Adam was mortal by nature but immortal by participation. That is, left to ourselves, death is as natural to human beings as it is for all other parts of the animate creation. There is nothing inherently immortal about flesh and blood—which is why flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God but must be put off for us to put on imperishability and immortality. What Adam and Eve were given was a source of life external to themselves that enabled them to enjoy a share in God's own eternal life and so be kept from death. This was mediated through the Tree of Life.

On this view death is unnatural when at looked at from the point of view of God's purpose in creating humanity. We were made to stay connected to God through trusting his word and obeying it and so stay in the realm of life by being caught up in something greater than ourselves. Yet death is natural when looked at from the point of view of humanity's nature. Humanity was made mortal like all creatures and so once we were cut off from God, we faced death like every other animal.

It is the image of God that made the difference, and this worked dynamically, not statically. It related us to God through his Image, his only begotten Son and so we were partakers in Life.

It's probably clear that I strongly favour this last view, despite the fact that, as far as I can see, it is a minority position within Evangelicalism.

Cop that! The idea is in the Bible, but in case there is any faint residue of powdery doubt gumming up the works, let's highlight a quote from the great man himself—that is, Athanasius—as supplied by Mark:

For the transgression of the commandment was making them turn back again according to their nature; and as they had at the beginning come into being out of non-existence, so were they now on the way to returning, through corruption, to non-existence again. The presence and love of the Word had called them into being; inevitably, therefore when they lost the knowledge of God, they lost existence with it for it is God alone Who exists, evil is non-being, the negation and antithesis of good. By nature, of course, man is mortal, since he was made from nothing, but he bears also the Likeness of Him Who is, and if he preserves that Likeness through constant contemplation, then his nature is deprived of its power and he remains incorrupt. (De Incarnatione §4)

Come on folks, you just know in your bones that this is the right way to think about death and mortality.

If you're still feeling a bit worried about that, skip everything I've just run through and have a read of 1 Corinthians 15.

The ever-flowing river of language

(From Andrew Malone, one of our Briefing readers in Melbourne, Australia.)

As a linguistic pedant, I've grown to love the precision of Kel Richards and his WordWatch column. As a Bible-believing evangelical, I can see the merit in calling myself a ‘fundamentalist’ in the more literal sense of the word. So imagine my horror when Kel Richards took such a term to task some time ago (Briefing #301, 2003). But he was right that “words don't stand still ... in the ever-flowing river that is the English language”. Hence I have reluctantly relinquished the label—at least for now.

So I couldn't help noticing an otherwise inconsequential comment in October, buried in a humour column at the back of the weekend magazine of the major newspapers published in Australia's major capitals. A reader had written in to complain that, although his (?) friends were accepting of his homosexuality, they had moved with the times. Like others around them, they were starting to use the word ‘gay’ to refer to something other than sexual orientation. He was taking offence that the revised term now detracted from his status, and perhaps even reflected negatively upon him.

To be sure, the fundamentalist in me felt a flash of vindication. How many of us rue the fact that the lovely word ‘gay’ has become so polarized, we can no longer enjoy its other meanings? (Just last week a television columnist wrote about the guilty pleasure of giggling whenever she tries to order a Golden Gaytime ice-cream.) How fascinating to watch someone who had (in my eyes) misappropriated a term from me now complain that others were misappropriating it from him! He was the one lamenting that the term was changing and becoming pejorative. He was the one intimating that society ought to take steps to preserve it from such decline.

As a more objective observation, it was simply interesting to perceive so starkly the ‘ever-flowing river’ of language at work, even within the space of a few decades. I wonder when ‘fundamentalist’ might come back into fashion ...