Almost a century ago, a lot of scientists didn’t want to believe that the universe was expanding, because that might imply that there was a moment of creation. They ended up being proved wrong. That doesn’t prove there’s a God, of course, but it’s still an interesting story, as discussed in the continuation of this posting.
The Questioning Christian
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Want to be a Near-Death Experience Test Subject?
The BBC reports that scientists in the UK “have devised an experiment to test whether out-of-body experiences close to death are a real phenomenon or just a trick being played by the brain.” They plan to put pictures in emergency rooms, but in places where a near-death patient wouldn’t be able to see them unless he or she was truly out of body. The principal investigator is quoted as saying “We reckon a year will give us 100 people who leave their bodies.”
This is a great idea. As Christians, we’re supposed to be focused on the truth, and we clearly don’t know everything about near-death experience, so let’s investigate it. You’ll forgive me, however, if I don’t rush to volunteer as a subject . . . .
Thanks to the Christdot blog for the pointer to this story.
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Science and Religion: Like a Bickering Married Couple
“If you know any couples who can’t live with each other and can’t live apart, then you have a good head start on understanding the relationship between science and religion.” That’s the lead in a Wall Street Journal article by Sharon Begley (paid subscription required) about a collaboration between MIT and the Dalai Lama to investigate meditation.
Quotable quotes:
These days, science and faith are making nice almost everywhere you look (the battle between creationism and Darwinian evolution being a sad exception). Neurobiologists are exploring the brain mechanisms that produce the feeling of oneness with the cosmos that advanced practitioners of Tibetan Buddhist meditation report. People of faith are finding support for their beliefs in cosmologists’ discoveries that the universe is “fine-tuned” to produce life. Even the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, has joined in. “If I had not been a monk,” he said last weekend, “I would have become an engineer.”
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“If science proves facts that are different from Buddhist understandings,” the Dalai Lama has vowed, “Buddhism must change.”
Sounds like a healthy attitude all ’round.
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Apostasy? What About the Episcopal Church’s Real Problems?
This morning my friend Bill, a briiliant but vociferously-conservative priest in our parish, circulated yet another email in passionate defense of “orthodox” Christianity. This particular email forwarded a like-minded letter by Mark Turner, a seminarian and sometime member of our parish, who is pursuing ordination in the Anglican Mission in America instead of in the Episcopal Church.
Often I don’t know whether to groan, or grin, when Bill sends out his screeds. He and other traditionalists usually dominate the discussion in our parish, and it pains me to see them doing the same via email. Normally I don’t go out of my way to confront them; quite the contrary. But I figure I was elected to the vestry to be one of the parish’s leaders, so I frequently “reply to all” to Bill’s emails, and I confess that I greatly enjoy taking up the challenge.
My response to Bill’s forward of Mark’s letter is reproduced below, slightly edited. It it, I assert that “apostasy,” quote unquote, is the least of the Episcopal Church’s problems, and that the church should be focusing instead on things like the growing challenge of radical Islam. I quoted a statement by the Archbishop of Cape Town that, in my view, demolishes the arguments of those who would expel the Episcopal Church from the Anglican Communion.
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Just Who is the Idolator?
It’s died down somewhat, but we still hear a lot of noise from some traditionalist Anglicans about the election of an openly-gay bishop by the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire. The basis of their argument is that homosexuality is supposedly condemned by the Bible, which supposedly is the ultimate standard by which all things moral and religious must be judged.
Some of my closest friends, people whom I respect and admire greatly, are traditionalist Christians. But the attitude of some traditionalists about the Bible seems tantamount to idolatry (or “bibliolatry“).
It seems to me that, if Scripture contained once-and-for-all answers to all moral questions, then we would still be stoning rebellious sons at the town gates, as commanded by Deut. 21:18-21. (I mentioned this point to my mother on the phone the other day. No doubt remembering me and my siblings in adolescence, she laughed and responded, “so?”)
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Religion = Ties That Bind (at least in Latin)
I was listening in the car to Harold S. Kushner’s audio book, The Lord Is My Shepherd: The Healing Wisdom of the Twenty-Third Psalm. Dr. Kushner claimed that the Latin root of the word “religion” means to bind together, like a ligament, and that religion has this function in communities.
I looked at a couple of on-line dictionaries to see whether his claim checked out. Those dictionaries indicate that the word religion is “perhaps” derived from the Latin religare — to tie back, to restrain, to tie fast. See the associated entries at dictionary.com and Mirriam-Webster.
So far Dr. Kushner’s book is quite interesting. He is also the author of such books as When Bad Things Happen to Good People.
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South African Archbishop Criticizes Anti-Gay Colleagues
According to this story last week in The Guardian, the Archbishop of Cape Town, Winston Njongonkulu Ndungane, one of the most senior Anglican churchmen in Africa, harshly criticized the recent hue and cry by traditionalist Anglicans on the subject of gay clergy.
The Guardian, which interviewed the archbishop, said that Ndungane’s remarks “appeared directly aimed at Peter Akinola, Archbishop of Nigeria, head of the largest single church in the Anglican world, who has claimed that homosexuals are lower than beasts and who has called for the American and Canadian Episcopal churches to be thrown out of the [Anglican] communion.”
Some interesting quotes attributed to Archbishop Ndungane in the article:
- “There is an attempt to divert us from the major life and death issues in the world. There is a woman waiting to be stoned to death for adultery in Nigeria and yet we are not hearing any fuss from the leadership of the church there about that.”
[Editorial comment: If you ask me, this quote deserves worldwide attention. It’s stupendously shortsighted for the would-be communion splitters to get themselves so exercised about gay clergy and gay marriage, while they ignore the much more serious challenges posed by Muslim fundamentalists].
- “The [U.S.] Episcopal church is an autonomous province with its own procedures and processes which determine its own decisions. It is full of good people and they have followed one of the most transparent and democratic processes of decision-making in the whole Anglican communion. It is very arrogant to assume that the people in America do not know what they are doing. We have got to respect their decision.”
- “Our church must learn how to live together as a diverse community. That’s what should be on the agenda, not seeking to cast stones or talking about schisms.”
- “There is an attempt to divert us from the major life and death issues in the world. There is a woman waiting to be stoned to death for adultery in Nigeria and yet we are not hearing any fuss from the leadership of the church there about that.”
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Repentance Without Guilt?
I suppose like many people, I grew up thinking that repentance of one’s sins requires guilt, anguish, even self-loathing. That faintly offended me — I felt I was living a reasonably good life, all in all, and I couldn’t understand why any of those feelings were called for. (Yes, I know, some people will say that my lack of these feelings was proof positive that I was indeed a sinner – QED, I guess.)
A few years ago, I learned that I may have misunderstood what repentance was all about. I read that the original Greek word in most places in the New Testament, which is usually translated as “repentance,” is metanoia, which according to this Greek lexicon means a change of mind or attitude. (Disclaimer: I know only a few words of Greek, so I might be totally missing the point.) Somewhat to my surprise, this change-of-mind meaning also shows up in English-language definitions of “repentance,” such as this one.
Does remorse still play a part in repentance? Unquestionably. A change of mind or attitude can certainly lead to remorse about one’s former mindset, and about the consequences stemming from it. Or, it might work the other way around – remorse could be a motivator for a true change of mind. In his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul says that “Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret” (2 Cor. 7-10).
I ran across a few interesting articles in a quick Google search. See, for example, this article about repentance and its meaning, from the perspective of a devout Christian. See also this list of Web writings on related subjects.
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Are You a “Christ”? Quite Possibly
If you’re reading this posting, the odds are that you are quite literally a christ. If your name is Jane, for example, it may well be that you could fairly be called Jane Christ.
Some people think that “Christ” is a second name for Jesus of Nazareth. Doubtless there are people who think Christ was Jesus’s family name, sort of the way that Windsor is the British royal family’s current official name. You can imagine a child referring to Joseph and Mary as Mr. and Mrs. Christ.
Christ is actually more like a title, however — probably a better usage would be “Christ Jesus,” analogous to “Queen Elizabeth” (the Apostle Paul’s writings use that phrasing quite a bit), or perhaps “Jesus the Christ.” Just what does that title mean?
The English word “christ” simply means “anointed one.” It derives from the Greek christos, corresponding to the Hebrew mashiyach or “messiah,” both having the same meaning.
In the Hebrew Bible, mashiyach is used (and christos is used in the Greek translation, the Septuagint) to refer to people designated by God for some task or purpose, such as priests, kings (such as David and Saul), and even the Persian king Cyrus the Great. See this article for a more detailed discussion, with scriptural citations; another list of such citations is here and a list of quotations is here. [UPDATE: See here for a Jewish perspective.]
In the New Testament (specifically, in the surviving Greek-language manuscript copies), Jesus is sometimes referred to as ho christos, the christ. Many first-century Jews believed that a divinely-anointed leader — THE Christ, or THE Messiah — would someday come to rescue Israel from oppression. See here for quotations. By analogy, when someone in the United States refers to the president, chances are that they’re referring to THE president, the one who lives in the White House, as opposed to, say, the president of the local garden club.
How is it that you might be a christ? If you’re a Christian, when you were baptized you may well have been anointed with a special oil called chrism, the name of which derives from the same Greek root as christos. See, for example, the Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church, at page 307. If you were so anointed, then you are literally an anointed one, i.e., a christ.
In a less literal sense, all baptized persons, anointed or not, are christs — they have been set apart for the special role defined by the baptismal covenant (BCP p. 304) and in the confirmation rite in which that covenant is reaffirmed (BCP p. 413). This suggests that the term Christ could fairly be used as an honorific for any baptized Christian. You’ve probably heard of priests being referred to as Father Bill or Bishop Ben — imagine the laity being addressed as Christ George or Christ Julie!
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Abandoning Faith: Two Contrasting Experiences
A perennial issue for churches is how to keep their children in the fold when they become teen-agers and adults. Why do so many young people seem to “check out” of religious faith?
It’s dangerous to make generalizations, especially on the basis of just a couple of data points. But I do wonder whether my own youthful abandonment of faith, and then my son’s markedly different experience along the same lines, might offer some things to think about.