The death of the religious right

Anyone but me notice the death of the religious right last week?  Apparently, the religious right had started feeling poorly after Mitt Romney took Ohio on Super Tuesday and had been declining steadily since Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum quit the Presidential race.  But the death announcement didn’t come until last Thursday, when Barack Obama was chatting with Robin Roberts on Good Morning America and said his position on gay marriage had evolved and he now thought that same-sex couples ought to be able to get married. (Do you think he chose the word “evolved” on purpose?  But I digress.)

Obama proposed no legislation or action.  He simply said this is where he is personally.  But what Obama’s statement says to me is that the religious right as a political force is dead for the time being.  Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and the social conservatives didn’t just lose the primary battle; they completely lost the election war.  The upcoming presidential election is going to be about the economy, and even more than that, it’s going to be about the issue of whether or not the US government can and should be managed like a business.  The defining issues are not going to be social questions, but whether or not the auto companies should have been bailed out, what the government’s role in health insurance should be, how responsible the President is for the unemployment rate and similar economic concerns.   “Issue” voters are irrelevant.

According to a Gallup Poll cited in this week’s issue of The Economist, 50% of the American population supports same-sex marriage. My hunch is Obama and his advisers looked at those numbers, added in another 25% or so of the population that is undecided and said, “The other 25% isn’t going to vote for us anyway, so the smart thing to do is to bolster our base instead of pandering to conservatives.”

Four years ago Obama waffled on gay marriage.  Not so now.  What’s changed?  I guess I’m too skeptical to believe his thinking really has evolved much.  I simply believe he doesn’t see the religious right as a group that can harm him.

Don’t misunderstand me.  There is a very live conservative movement in our country.  They may unseat the President. But if they do, it will be because of three things: 1) lingering anger over the government bailouts, 2) what happens the next few months with the unemployment numbers and 3) how the stock market performs between now and the election (which may have a lot more to do with Europe’s economic struggles than ours). These things will be pivotal, not what Obama said about gay marriage last week. To quote the slogan from another Presidential campaign, “It’s the economy, stupid!”

A USA Today headline on Friday stated “Obama’s gay marriage announcement followed by flood of campaign donations. (A friend read that headline and sarcastically said, “Really?  I didn’t even know he was gay.  Now he’s married?”  Again I digress, but I will note that Jay Leno has made a nice living off of the headline writers in this country.  I think my all-time favorite is “Court to try shooting defendant.”) The USA Today missed the real story, though.  And no, that story isn’t how many donations the Romney campaign received after Obama’s statement.  The real story they should have run is the obituary of the religious right. When a sitting President can defy them, they’ve lost their influence.

Merge!

I believe the Christian Reformed Church in North America and the Reformed Church in America should merge.  Please tell me why they shouldn’t.  I mean that literally.  Please respond to this blog and tell me why they shouldn’t.

This is not a new conviction of mine.  I remember sitting in a seminary class almost thirty years ago discussing Paul’s great calls for unity in I Corinthians and the professor passionately lamenting the sinful nature of the fractures in the body of Christ.  Naïve kid that I was, I raised my hand and asked, “Why don’t the RCA and CRC merge?”  I remember his answer clearly.  The first reason was women’s ordination.  In the intervening years, that’s been solved.  The second was that a lot of denominational employees would lose their jobs.   That reason causes two distinct thoughts to come into my mind.

1.  I don’t believe the purpose of a denomination is to employ people. 
2. Haven’t the cutbacks caused by the poor economy in recent years already left each denomination’s staff so thin a merger would actually help?

Whatever differences remain don't seem significant.  What are the differences?  Sunday evening worship?

I know (and applaud) all sorts of missional initiatives being done together between the two denominations.  I know (and applaud) that the Pillar Church in Holland (where so much of the bitter divorce happened over a century and a half ago) is reconstituting itself as a joint CRC-RCA congregation.  I know (and applaud) that West Michigan’s most influential philanthropist wants to see the two become one in his lifetime and his generosity has sparked many joint ventures. 

I just wonder what’s stopping a full merger from becoming reality.

When Branch Rickey was about to tell the world he had signed Jackie Robinson to break the long-standing color line in baseball he told a friend of his plans.  “Branch,” his friend said, “All hell will break lose when you do this.”  “No,” Mr. Rickey told his friend, “All heaven will rejoice.” 

Heaven will rejoice if the CRC and RCA came back together.  Why shouldn’t they?

Me and Barack

The other day James Bratt posted a careful, scholarly review of Calvinism and Politics on this site.  Here’s more, neither careful nor scholarly. . . .

I dreamt the other night that I was driving a small car with two passengers: my delightful wife Gretchen and Barack Obama. Humble man that he is (in my dreams), the President sat scrunched in the backseat and asked that we take him to chapel at both Hope and Calvin College.

As dreams so often go, we never got to Hope and I went to the wrong building at Calvin. As soon as I dropped my wonderful wife and the President off, I knew I had made a mistake. I kept saying, “No, it’s supposed to be the place that looks like a Pizza Hut.” (I would never say that about Calvin’s chapel while wide awake, but how can I be held responsible for what happens in my dreams?) Having now misplaced both my fanstastic wife and the President, I drove on some sidewalks across Calvin’s campus until I found them, sitting under a tree.  My amazing wife was doing all the talking, bragging to the President about the various accomplishments of our children. 

Just as Barack was about to say something, some college students came by, did a double take and then asked the President for his autograph.  As he was signing, Mr. Obama turned to me and said, “Let’s get out of here. When people start asking for your autograph, it’s time to move on.”  “Yes,” I thought to myself, marveling at the man’s wisdom.  “When they start asking for your autograph, it’s time to move on.”  This notion resonated deeply with me, as if Mr. Obama were restating a proverb as old as humanity.

“By the way,” I asked as we got back to the car. “Where’s the Secret Service?”

The President laughed. “Oh, I don’t need them here.  This is Calvin College.”

Barack Obama was in the back seat while I started our little grey car up.  We were pretty cozy in there.  I was feeling a bit anxious about how much leg room he had (and how safe he really was at Calvin College) when my alarm went off.  I woke, feeling somewhat disturbed, wondering what in the world this dream meant.  (Talk about dreams of grandeur.) Where’s Carl Jung when you really need him? 

Three questions:

1. If you were hanging out with Barack Obama, what would you say?  Would you tell him about your kids or maybe take the opportunity to ask him a few questions.  If you could ask him something, what would it be?

2. Is it really time to move on when people start asking for your autograph?

3. I’m jealous that Jamie Smith’s recent post about N.T. Wright has turned into “Ask Tom.”  Would someone please sign in as Barack Obama and start up a Q and A session? 

There Will Be Blood

One Good Friday I heard an NPR caller say something to the effect that she could never accept Christianity because it was based on a barbaric system of blood sacrifice.  Call me naïve, but the evangelical subculture I’d spent my life in talked about being washed in the blood of the lamb so often that her objection never occurred to me.  All of a sudden, after her comment, I heard things I’d always heard about “precious flows” with new ears.  Was my faith built on some sort of bloodlust?

To what extent does the blood involved in Jesus’ death give the event meaning?  There’s a whole movement of people who have gravitated away from the sort of understandings of the atonement I grew up on toward other interpretations.  Perhaps the most well-known is the Christus Victor group, led by NT Wright and others.

Wouldn’t it be easier to skip right over Holy Week to Easter, to move right to the resurrection and omit the blood of the Passover lamb, the great drops of blood in Gethsemane and the sorrow and love that flowed mingled down at Calvary? Can’t we forget about all the blood this week?  Fortunately, I rub shoulders daily with an assortment of theologians who are much smarter than me.  Like a Monopoly player with a “Get out of Jail Free” card, I enjoy the wonderful job perk of being able to get out of the theological corners I think myself into by asking a question or two during a coffee break.

So I put my questions to my colleagues. One said, “The heart and foundation of Christianity is the death of Jesus ‘for us’ . . .  Jesus' death is indeed a sacrifice, and this is irreducible for most Christians. It may even be ‘barbaric’ in the sense that humans putting the Son of God to death is the worst thing that could ever happen. But it is important to note that it is the sacrifice that ends all other bloody sacrifice for Christians.  The Christian church soon distanced itself from the Jewish temple and its system of sacrifice.”

Interesting.  But what about Christus Victor as a way to understand the atonement?  Here’s another voice: “I'm not sure if the avoidance of blood-talk is exactly what Wright's up to, but it's possible. Overall I think he and others are trying to shake loose the hold that a radical substitutionary atonement theory has had on the church and by implication this may include the desire to reduce the blood emphasis . . . When articulating a Christus Victor atonement theology it is also important to stake out how one understands justification in this formulation. Of course as a theologian, I would say it is more important to articulate the concept correctly rather than palatably. But as long as you can do both, I'm cool with that.”

Which is why I love the theologians at Western Theological Seminary.  They use phrases like “I’m cool with that” when wading into deep waters.

But what about the woman’s objections of barbarism?  Here’s another scholar: “Blood sacrifice itself is not so much about violence--which is assumed in this quote's use of the word ‘barbaric,’ but rather about the offering up of life--since life is what blood symbolizes in Scripture (Gen 9:4-5; Lev 17:11ff.;  Deut 12:23; Psalm 72:14; John 6:53).  The sacrifice of animals recognizes God as the giver of life, and offers that life symbolically back to God.  To deride this as barbaric, without understanding the cultural context of sacrifice in the ancient world, is simply to express an ethnocentric arrogance and myopathy.”

That’s another reason I love the theologians at WTS – they use words like “myopathy.”  Here’s a little more from the same source.  “Christian faith looks at the death of Jesus through many lenses, not simply through the lens of ‘blood sacrifice.’  There is a breadth of paradoxical wisdom and insight that the church has drawn from the death of Jesus, much of which is ‘foolishness’ in the world's eyes, but which Christians believe in fact is the road to life.  If we come to the cross expecting to learn, rather than simply to explore whether our existing values cohere with this event or not, we may find ourselves in a position to be changed!”

Jim Brownson said this.  (The other voices were Bob Van Voorst and Chris Dorsey.)  Jim’s dad Bill recently published a memoir where he wrote about needing a transfusion as a child.  He screamed in terror as they wheeled him down the hospital hall, into a room where his father was lying in the other bed.  His father gave him the transfusion the old-fashioned way – arm to arm – and saved his life.

Blood is life.  Sacrifice is “for us.” Let us come to the cross expecting to learn.   

The Rabbi's Question

“If the Messiah had come,” the rabbi asked, “would the world be the way that it is?”

 How would you answer the rabbi’s question?

 He said this sort of off-handedly during a “model Seder” in his synagogue.  The rabbi was explaining the Messianic expectations found in this special celebration, and he knew he was talking to a room bursting with Christians.  But it didn’t strike me that he was being antagonistic or provocative.  It was just sort of a statement of fact. 

 I had been enjoying myself before the rabbi’s question made me stop and think.  We’d been eating lots of food -- not just parsley sprigs dipped in salt water and horseradish and haroset, but gefilte fish and matzoh ball soup and all sorts of matzoh-based desserts.  The gefilte fish gave the man next to me an opportunity to explain what it meant to be an Ashkenazi Jew.  He was wearing a beautiful skull cap – a sort of amazing Technicolor yarmulke – and his children were young enough that the Seder was full of fun and mystery.  I was envious.  What do we do in our homes and churches that combines food, symbolism, the Bible, singing, and prayers in this way?  The man told me his family’s Seder celebration usually lasts about four hours.  Four hours! Talk about “impressing these things on your children.”  I thought of how often I feel restless on Sundays when we have Communion, glancing at my wristwatch and wondering what effect the extra twenty minutes will have on adult education attendance. 

 When the rabbi – who seemed like a gentle and cheerful man – asked what he did, his question stopped me cold.  What would you say to him?  Sitting in a Seder – even a model Seder – and thinking about slavery and suffering helped frame my reluctance to want to say anything. I thought of the theological challenge of the Holocaust.  Do you consider the Holocaust part of your family history? The rabbi does.  As well as the Roman destruction of the temple. And Masada. And the ghettos of Eastern Europe.  And Tsarist Russia. And the Spanish Inquisition. And a thousand other pogroms. I thought about all the religious wars throughout history. 

 No, I thought, you really can’t demonstrate that the Messiah has come by looking at the state of the world.  Maybe you can prove the reality of sin, but not the reality of the Messiah.  

 However, this memory came to me while I was ruminating on the rabbi’s question, and I don’t quite know what to do with this, but it seems significant.  I remember talking to a well-educated Jewish friend once and mentioning the story of the Prodigal Son in passing.

 "What’s that?” she said.

 “Seriously?” I asked.  “Seriously, you don’t know what I’m talking about?”

 “No,” she said, “I don’t.”

 That’s what I’m left with when I think about what the rabbi said. Not how to prove something but simply how my life has been enriched in ways beyond my understanding because of the New Testament.  I’m who I am because of stories like the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, the woman at the well and the widow’s mite.  I can’t imagine a life where I don’t know Lazarus, Martha and Mary, or impulsive Peter.  Or Paul and I Corinthians 13 or Romans 8 or the book of Philippians.  But most of all there’s Jesus. And the Holy Spirit.  I don’t just believe the Messiah has come, I believe he’s still alive.

The Seder is all about remembering.  In contrast to that, when I take bread and wine in the meal Christians celebrate that was instituted during a Seder, I don’t just remember, I also believe I’m communing with my Lord in the present.

 I suppose the rabbi would find that notion as hard to swallow as I found the gefilte fish.

Gefilte fish . . . it’s an acquired taste.  Figuring out why certain people like it while others don’t is a mystery. Kind of like faith.  Seems like a worthy Lenten sort of thing to contemplate.