What the Hell? Rob Bell and the Puritans

It’s hard to recall a more anticipated book than Rob Bell’s Love Wins. The Twitter feed alone suggests the book has quite a few evangelicals seething at the suggestion that hell may not be a popular destination after all.  The dispute appears to have burst onto the scene from nowhere, but in reality, this is the latest in a long history of intense theological debates, dating back to the early modern world of the Westminster Divines.

To continue reading visit The Presbyterian Outlook 

Libya is Not Iraq

In Iraq Then, Libya Now Ross Duluth of the New York Times tries to slow the momentum toward our giving military assistance to the Libyan rebels. In doing so, he argues that we have failed to learn the lessons of the Iraq War.

One [lesson] is that the United States shouldn’t go to war unless it has a plan not only for the initial military action, but also for the day afterward, and the day after that. Another is that the United States shouldn’t go to war without a detailed understanding of the country we’re entering, and the forces we’re likely to empower. 

Libya is not Iraq. As simple as this construction seems, Duluth misses it. The debate about Iraq hinged on the existence or near existence of weapons of mass destruction. Everything else was secondary. In Libya we are talking about limited action for a cause clearly related to our national interests. 

I worry that Duluth is likely to find a receptive audience in a war weary public, tending toward isolationism.  Such a tendency, informed by Duluth's strictures, would prevent us from acting not only in Libya but also in cases like Rwanda.  In the face of madness the question is what we can do. Sometimes the hard truth is that we can do very little. At other times, however, we discover that limited action has a good chance of success, sometimes far beyond the risks. In such cases, the responsible nation does what it can.  This is the case with Libya.

A Politics of the Profound

This last week we have witnessed what may be the story of the year or even the decade. The dramatic scenes across North Africa and especially Egypt have captured the world's attention and reminded us of the vast scale of politics. Might this be the dawning of a new moment in the Muslim world, or will the protests give way to repression or extremism? 

Domestically these events have humbled all but the most partisan or idealistic. Different members of the Obama administration have issued their cautious statements, appropriately circumspect before what may be a historic moment.

Egypt has dwarfed all other events, including the administration's post-State of the Union media blitz. The State of the Union now looks rather paltry, but then so does most of our politics – when they are not sounding overwrought.

Perhaps this is as it should be in the day-to-day, but the State of the Union is not just any other day. It is one of those high holy days in politics, a national ritual that reminds us that politics deals with the profound.

To continue reading, visit EthicsDaily.com.

Are We Asking the Wrong Question in Afghanistan?

With the agreement by Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai to convene the recently elected parliament, a growing crisis appears to have been averted. As important as this decision is in the short term, however, it will not settle the larger question of whether we can win the war. 
 

Ask this question and you can expect three basic answers. A host of critics will try to convince you that the war can't be won. Advocates will insist that this is a war we can and must win. Then there are those Americans caught in the middle, fearing the worst but uncertain of how to proceed. 

Strong debate is crucial to the health of a democracy such as ours, of course, but this debate has gone on interminably and it appears to have contributed little to the war effort. The problem is that the debate is focused on the conditions on the ground, a complicated question given that the "the ground" covers a large and varying terrain and that conditions are often in a state of flux.

Even if we were able to answer this question with some sense of certainty, it is not the most important question. The decisive question is not can we win, but will the Afghanis fight.

To continue reading visit EthicsDaily.com

King the Pastor

This year Martin Luther King Day feels different to me, more serious and alive, but also more complicated. On the one hand my thoughts keep drifting back to Tucson, worrying that we may be re-entering a tragic chapter of our history in which a generation of leaders was taken from us all too soon.  This is not the 60s, but I can’t help but worry about where we are headed. I worry about our leaders and the hateful rhetoric hurled at them, and I pray that God will keep them safe. 

Martin Luther King would want us to take it a step further: to heed God’s call to boldly confront hate, to take creative action. The problem is that this doesn’t feel like the time for marches or boycotts or protests. It feels like the time for unity, prayers, and talk of how we can work together. In this time we need to hear from King the pastor, the one who cared for souls, both in his congregation and in the larger civil rights struggle. This is the King who preached funerals for the movement’s martyrs.  In wake of Tucson, one thinks of the eulogy he delivered for the four young girls murdered by the bomber of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. There the stakes were clear and dramatic, and King was direct in urging those gathered to avoid bitterness: “So in spite of the darkness of this hour we must not despair. We must not become bitter; nor must we harbor the desire to retaliate with violence.” 

In Tucson President Obama seemed to be channeling King, calling us to rise above the seething resentments of our politics.  “The loss of these wonderful people should make every one of us strive to be better,” Obama said, and then recalling Christina Taylor Green, “I want to live up to her expectations.  I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it.  I want America to be as good as she imagined it.  All of us -– we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations.” 

Tucson is not Birmingham. In Birmingham King faced a well-organized terrorist movement committed to racist ideology in service to a Caucasian identity.  In Tucson the victims were shot by a crazed gunman whose motivations are still being determined.

In both cases, however, the attacks were felt more widely and they served to prompt the question of how to respond to the attacks, both personally and politically. This is where we most need to hear King’s wisdom that the greatest weapon against violence is not hate, but love.

King’s idea of love is a long way from contemporary notions celebrating love as an attraction that may come or go. He thought of love not simply as a feeling but as a virtue that depended not on the recipient’s appeal, but on the giver’s settled disposition. This word, giver, gets at King’s idea of love with its deep roots in the biblical notion of agape. The key to this form of love, as demonstrated by Jesus and Gandhi, is its strength, its stubborn refusal to yield to hate, indifference, or any of the other vices that would separate us from one another.  While racism is bound up with the urge to segregate, King understood love to be devoted to the creation of the beloved community in which all members are cherished as children of God.

In the aftermath of Tucson many of us feel a deep longing for some hint that together we might build something more than the fractious, hurried, and brutal society we fear we are becoming. King’s inspiring life and heroic death remind us that aspirations are not actions and that dreams are worth little unless they inspire a new reality. King offers us more, much more, than calls for a kinder and gentler society. I do not mean to criticize civility, far from it, but civility on its own is not enough. The duty of self-restraint is no match for the passion of politics. If civility is to endure for more than a season, it must be wedded to the virtue of love. As King said so many times, love can heal the broken; it can even transform enemies into friends.

In our time of 24-hour news cycles and professional provocateurs, we may think this naive, but neither the smallness nor meanness of our politics can defeat agape any more than Bull Connor could defeat King and his army of children.  It is those martyrs we remember today (not Connor), and it they who remind us that we are called to be witnesses to a love stronger than hate. 

Good Friday on Championship Monday?

Watching the college football championship game being played in Arizona last night, felt strange to me, sort of like returning to the scene of the crime to throw a party. There was nothing to be done--or I haven’t thought of it. We needed a good game, but why did it have to be in Arizona? It was almost as if the Fates had conspired to make us endure the tragic comedy in which old people and a little girl are shot down in cold blood and football players proudly cant their praise to the god of football. Who can blame those who curse this god and any and all faith? What kind of universe would this be if it were true that God was too busy deciding football games to bother with saving little girls from crazed gunmen?

To read the entire post on the Outlook Blog, click Good Friday on Championship Monday?

Does the Spirit of Christmas Live?

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

This year I wanted to write a kind of Christmas letter in praise of the Spirit of Christmas...as a way of saying thanks to E, A, and all of you who remind me of what Christmas is all about.

Does the Spirit of Christmas Live? (my title)
It’s become customary this time of year to hear concerns expressed about the loss of Christmas spirit. Sometimes these fears are more about one’s cultural identity — and the sense that one’s group is losing power and influence — than they are about the actual meaning of Christmas. At other times, one hears something that sounds less reactionary and more like a thoughtful question: Have our Christmas rituals lost some of their meaning? Have they become old and tired or do they pale in comparison to more novel inventions?

Questions like these may be prompted by our experience or by polls like this one by the folks at Gallop, “Christmas Strongly Religious for Half in U.S. Who Celebrate It.” These headlines, like all headlines, tend to be written provocatively, which appeals to the culture warrior in all of us as well as the thoughtful social critic who resides deeper in our hearts. The story seems to be one of a divided culture in which one half of us sees a profound meaning in Christmas and the other half is engaged in one long shopping frenzy. The reality is very different and as luck, fate, or grace would have it, a good bit more comforting.

To read the entire post, visit: Being Blog - The Secular and Sacred Spirit of Christmas