Narrated by Global National anchor Kevin Newman, who also co-wrote and co- produced the documentary, Hip 2B Holy ventures inside Canada’s evangelical underground to reveal its growing influence, supporters, and political aspirations.

“The growth and power of the evangelical movement is a fascinating part of Canada’s current fabric,” says Newman. “But the mutual mistrust between journalists and followers has prevented a judgment-free examination. With our current prime minister among those who believe in this new version of church, we need to examine the evangelic movement for what it is, not what secular Canada assumes it is.” (Non-Quebecers who attend regularly at evangelical churches are four times more likely to vote for the Conservatives than for Liberals or the NDP, according to an exit poll conducted by Ipsos-Reid after the January 2006 Canadian election.)

If the fair-minded approach taken by these two video clips reflects the content of the show, it should be very worthwhile.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1RbMI7heQI[/youtube] [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2GYXl2iI10[/youtube]

“Hip 2B Holy” is scheduled to air at 10:00 pm on Monday, 25 May.

In a recent interviewe with Marshall Allan of the Las Vegas Sun, he gave this response when asked about the relationship between science and religion.

When you go to ask a question you have to know what kind of question it is and therefore what is the right set of tools to answer it. If it’s a question about “Why am I here?” or “What’s the meaning of life?” or “Is there a God?” then science is not going to be useful. Either you have to decide those are questions that are irrelevant and shouldn’t be discussed or you have to step outside pure materialism and have another world view, which is a spiritual one. As long as you’re clear about the kind of questions you’re asking then there is really no conflict between having both a scientific and a spiritual world view.

Dr Collins’s common-sense view sounds positively refreshing after listening to the reductionist tripe of the so-called New Atheists.

h/t: Faith-Science News

With apologies to President Obama, and for that matter most politicians, the Resurrection is change you can believe in.

Read the whole thing.

Here are some highlights.

Evangelical Christians volunteer and give to charitable causes, both religious and non-religious, at higher rates and higher levels than other Canadians. Moreover, these elevated levels of giving and volunteering can be explained by religious commitment and religious motivations.
[…]
Conservative Protestants, or Evangelicals, on average, give more money to charity per capita than do members of other Christian religious groups in Canada.
[…]
Weekly attendance makes a difference in the giving patterns of Canadians. Regardless of which major religious group looked at in 1997, giving rose as the frequency of attendance at religious services increased.

Compared to non-attenders, conservative Protestants gave more to both religious and non-religious causes in 1997.

Sixty percent of conservative Protestants who attend church weekly participated in volunteer activities, compared to 31 percent of Canadians. The former group volunteered more hours than the latter for both religious and non-religious organisations.

A secondary analysis of Statistics Canada’s data by Acadia University Sociology Professor Kurt Bowen found that level of religious activity is correlated with rates of volunteering:

[T]he religiously active in every age group show higher rates of volunteering that those who never attend religious services.
[...]
The religiously active at all educational and income levels have much higher rates of volunteering than do the religiously inactive in the same income and education bracket.

Moreover, 63 percent of those who attend religious services weekly told surveyors that they are motivated to volunteer by a desire to fulfill religious obligations or beliefs.

These results tell a story similar to that found in American studies: The religiously observant are, by and large, more generous than those who are not.

What worries the Sangh Parivar is not the welfare of dalits but a possible reduction in upper-caste Hindu numbers. Their prejudice is so entrenched that they are not in a position to sense the agony of those who suffer under the caste-based system. In general, Hindu believers treat the disadvantaged as sinners reaping the fruits of a past life. Thus, a leper is to be shunned; the exploitation of dalits is justified. On the contrary, a Christian finds an opportunity for spiritual fulfillment in serving the leper and healing the sick. Before they build churches, Christians normally build schools and hospitals. Why do major Hindu religious establishments involve themselves only in collecting donations and not in performing such community services?
[…]
Unless the problems inherent to Hinduism are addressed, conversion can never be stopped. A Christian marries his or her co-religionist; a Muslim does the same. Is that possible for Hindus across caste? Are the upper castes ready to welcome reservation for their Hindu brothers? Is their society ready for inter-dining and for inter-caste marriages? Without these conditions being fulfilled, no one on earth can stop the rejection of Hinduism by the socalled lower castes.

A recent Christian initiative makes it unlikely that this clash will end soon.  The Global Ecumenical Conference on Justice for Dalits held last month in Bangkok, Thailand, called on Christians around the world to fight against caste-based discrimination.

Caste-based discrimination severely affects some 260 million people worldwide, an estimated 200 million of them in India alone. In India, considered the biggest democracy in the world, these discriminated people, once labeled and treated as “untouchable” due to Brahmanic ritual traditions viewing them as “polluted” or “polluting,” now call themselves Dalits (“oppressed”, “crushed”).

Conference participants issued the Bangkok Declaration, pledging to make Dalit liberation a central mission objective.

Of the 27 million Christians in India, over 18 million are Dalits. India has implemented free education and affirmative action for Hindu, Buddhist, and Sikh Dalits, but Christian and Muslim Dalits are specifically excluded.

This is nonetheless a most fitting sermon for today. Jesus suffered temptation during his forty days in the wilderness. He learned the obedience that we failed to; he bears our disobedience; and he shows us what obedience is.

“Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.”

Learning through suffering was an ancient maxim of the Greeks most wonderfully illustrated in the story of Odysseus. Many in modern times have been graduates, too, of that proverbial school of hard knocks. Necessity can be one heck of a teacher.

But what is it that is learned through ancient suffering and the contemporary school of hard knocks? What are the lessons? For the ancient Greeks, they are to know the order of the cosmos and man’s place within that order. For modernity, whether in aphorisms or in clichés, the lessons are more ambiguous because more individual. Yet, at the very least, they are about a sense of ourselves and our world, too, as having some sort of purpose and meaning.

The lessons of this holy season, however, go beyond knowing the order of the cosmos and negotiating the ambiguities of contemporary experience. The Letter to the Hebrews spells out the lesson which Lent illustrates. The lesson is obedience. The illustration is the life of Jesus Christ concentrated into the intensity of forty days.

“Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.” “Although he was a Son”, this is who he is, the Son of the Father. The Son is defined by his relation to the Father. These are all the tough lessons of theology. He is the eternal Son of the everlasting Father: “there was not when he was not”. He is always the Son of the Father. His whole being is defined by his love of the Father’s will. It is obedience. The obedience is not just doing what one is told blindly and ignorantly. It is the doing of what in fact he is in his love for the Father. A knowing and loving obedience is the nature of the eternally and only-begotten Son of the Father.

The Letter to the Hebrews underscores what he essentially is in order to highlight the mystery of our redemption. Yet in what he essentially is, obedience is not learned. It is not something acquired, but something possessed. He is what he is and he does what he is; his act is his being. A knowing and loving obedience belongs to the act of his essential being.

The mystery of our redemption follows in what he learns through suffering. He learns obedience. How can he, who is the obedient Son, learn obedience? How can he learn what he already is? Because he has engaged himself with our world and with our life. He has entered into it and identified himself fully and completely with all that belongs to the truth of our humanity. But that is to place himself in the finite context of a human life. He wills to place himself in the place of suffering. He wills to learn through suffering.

Lent begins with the temptations of Christ. The temptations belong to the beginnings of Jesus’ public ministry, to the beginning of the way of the cross, the way of suffering freely embraced. Jesus wills to learn what we have failed to learn and live. He learns obedience through the suffering which belongs to our failure to accept and live what God wants us to do and be. To be tempted comes with the territory of our being rational creatures. It belongs to the truth and good of our being.

To succumb to temptation, on the other hand, belongs to our sinfulness, to our falling away from the conditions of our creaturehood. Its essence is disobedience – a willful denial of God’s truth upon which our being depends. In other words, Jesus does what we should have done but haven’t done. Jesus does what we should have done but now cannot do – such is the reality of original sin and its legacy – however much we may want to do it. He learns obedience through suffering all our disobedience.

Classical Protestantism (drawing especially upon Augustine) had a wonderful syllogistic aphorism that captures this understanding perfectly. Man before the Fall from grace in the Garden, was “posse non peccare,” able not to sin; Man after the Fall is “non posse non peccare,” not able not to sin; but in Christ, our humanity will have achieved that perfection which is fully realized in Christ, though not yet fully in us, namely, “non posse peccare,” not able to sin. You have to love the concision of the Latin!

The temptations of Christ are a most dramatic illustration of the lessons of our redemption. Biblically, Christ is the new Moses who overcomes the acts of Israel’s disobedience and ours. The difference is that Moses can only state what Israel failed to learn; Jesus shows us the lessons in action. He is ever the Word in motion, the Word that is done; “the Word made flesh.” The temptations relate to the reality of the Incarnation. He learns obedience in the being of the creature whose refusal to learn is disobedience.

“Although he was a Son” signals that he freely is what he freely wills to learn. It belongs to the mystery of our redemption that: “Jesus always receives what he bestows”; that Jesus “underwent what he redeemed”; that Jesus “who delivers from death himself died”; that Jesus “who gives resurrection himself rose from the dead”; that Jesus “who baptizes was himself baptized”; that Jesus “who saves in temptation was himself tempted;” in short, “because of what he is, he causes in us what he himself undergoes” (Hans Urs Von Balthasar).

The temptations of Christ show us the obedience which he learned and which we have failed to learn. But the lesson is shown so that we in him may learn to be what God would have us be, obedient sons and daughters who are willing to learn through the suffering which our disobedience occasions. The temptations that Christ undergoes are the temptations of Israel, and they are our temptations too.

Israel in the wilderness complained to God about bread and water. They tempted God; they put God to the test. In other words, Israel sought to make God serve the demands of our bodily and worldly desires, our appetites. Israel endeavoured to make God subject to our wills, to do for us what would make him acceptable to us. There is perhaps, no greater temptation than the contemporary demand that God accommodate himself to us and to our view of things. That is not all. Israel in the wilderness denied the truth of the God who had delivered them from bondage in Egypt. They worshipped instead an image of their own making, the golden calf. As if you could be saved by a dead cow! Thus, Israel categorically denied the God who had commanded that “thou shalt have no other gods before me”- that is to say, “thou shalt not serve any other gods.” Moses fasted “forty days and forty nights” in intercession to God for sinful Israel.

The whole story of the exodus is deliberately recalled, recapitulated and re-worked in the person of Jesus Christ. He bears the temptations of Israel in himself and overcomes them. That he does so is not a display of divine power, an effortless banishment of the devil and all the vanity of his show; he does so only through the agony of suffering. “He learned obedience.” There is a struggle, a fight in the wilderness. It is, literally, a battle of words.

Jesus’ answers to Satan are the lessons which Moses taught but which we and Israel fail to learn. The answers are always and ever true but, more especially, they are true in him who does what he says and is what he does. What are those answers? “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God”; “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God”; and, as if to bring all things home to truth itself, “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and him only shalt thou serve.”

These are the lessons which have always and ever to be learned by those who would be the humanity that God would have us be. Yet they are the answers which we all have failed to learn. He who is the Word of God wills to bear our disobedience in his free-willing obedience to the Father’s will. He has done so in what belongs to us. He has done so that he may continue to do so in us, if we will go with him. If we will go with him, then, we, too, will learn the obedience of being the sons of God, but only through him who is the Son of God.

“Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.”

Amen.

Thomas Jefferson was wrong about one thing: Human equality is not “self-evident.” Inequality is self-evident.
[…]
The Bible wrote the principle of human equality into the American soul by its insistence that all human beings, male and female, are made in God’s image. We’re all descended from one set of parents, Adam and Eve, and therefore are brothers and sisters. So no race or group is inherently superior or inferior to any other. We’re all equal because we’re all sinners, and because God loves us all equally. So we are all equally valuable in the eyes of the most important Valuer. We’re all bound by, and protected by, the same moral law that originates from the same God. No one—not even a king—is exempt. This is the basis for political equality.

The influence of the Bible goes beyond political equality: Biblical faith has also encouraged charity—self-sacrifice for the less fortunate, which reminds me of something I read recently.

If we believe that it befits a man to enter a burning building to save someone else’s child, it is because we hear the words ringing in our ears still, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matt. 25:40).

It may offend secularists and those prudes who think that religion ought to be kept behind closed doors, but charity and concern for the poor are integral to our culture today because of Christianity.
[…]
Though it is not polite to say so, still it cries out for notice. Hindus do not send holy men into foreign lands to feed the hungry and house the naked; they will not do so for the pariahs in their own land. Buddhists, practicing benevolent detachment from the world, do not do so. Muslims, who conquer by force, and who reject natural law on the grounds that it “fetters” Allah, are required to take care of their own, but they ignore everyone else. All cults of ancestor worship, like Shinto, are too firmly fixed upon the local and the familial to care for people far away. The Jews and Christians would care, because of the God they worship: and they did. If the world speaks of human rights now, and the dignity of the poor, it is because the world has heard of Moses and the prophets—and, summing them up in himself, Christ. Men have come at last neither to love the world nor to despise it simply, but to love its goodness, not as a final end, but as a manifestation of the goodness that is eternal. [footnotes omitted]

That goes a long way to explaining why religious conservatives consistently donate more of their time, energy, and resources to charitable causes than do secular liberals, and why the United States is far ahead of any other country in giving to foreigners.

Source of second quote: Anthony Esolen, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization, Regnery, 2008, pp. 128-29.

h/t: Alice the Camel

DIRECTOR OF the National Transformation Programme (NTP), Reverend Merrick ‘Al’ Miller, is calling on the Government to entrust the leadership of the nation’s primary and basic schools to the church.

Speaking to The Sunday Gleaner on the initiatives to be undertaken by the NTP, Miller criticised the current education system for not making moral character development a priority, along with academics.

The NTP, ‘A Fresh Start for Jamaica’ initiative, is a moral, value-based programme seeking to coordinate the activities of the church, state, business and civil society to tackle problems in the society. The programme, though independent of the Government, operates out of the Office of the Prime Minister.

“All we are doing with our present education system is trying to push kids through to pass an exam and, hence, we are creating persons who are not able to relate and to deal with the issues of life,” Miller states.

The head of a teachers’ union thinks Rev Miller’s comment is unfair but offers no suggestions for improvement.

In 2008, over 1600 persons were murdered in Jamaica. 2009 got off to an inauspicious start, with 13 killed during the first 48 hours of the new year.

Beginning from the miraculous sign of divine glory at Cana, Fr Curry delivered a wide-ranging message that spoke about man’s ambiguous attitude toward miracles. On one hand, we are skeptical; on the other, we earnestly desire wonders. Thus, human power and modern technology intrigue and even enslave us.

The miracles of Christ, by contrast, combine power and wisdom perfectly. They reveal God’s glory and goodness.

“This beginning of signs did Jesus in Cana of Galilee and manifested forth his glory.”

Jesus manifested forth his glory. What is that glory? It is “the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father,” which we heard on Christmas Eve. And so it is God’s glory – the radiating splendor of the being and truth of God. And it is God’s glory made known. Such is epiphany. It belongs to the glory that it be made manifest. It is made known in Christ Jesus who is the fullness and the express image, the articulated expression, the uttered being of God. It is made known, St. John is saying in today’s Gospel through a miracle, “this beginning of signs which Jesus did in Cana of Galilee”.

A miracle. Epiphany is the season of miracles. But is it not the season of teaching? God teaching us from the midst of the world, from within the conditions of our humanity? Yes, to be sure. The miracles are the “signs and wonders” of the divine teaching. They show us the Word in deed, in action, as it were, and in the midst of the human condition. But is it not also the season of the manifestation of glory? Yes, the miracles belong to the radiating splendor of God’s being and truth. Miracles manifest God’s glory and miracles teach.

Epiphany as the manifestation of God’s glory calls us to worship. Epiphany as the season of teaching bids us to be teachable. Epiphany as the season of miracles concerns both. There is the glory and the worship, the teaching and our teachableness.

We have the greatest difficulty about miracles because we refuse the glory and the teaching. We deny the essential relation to what is transcendent. It is a question of attitude, a question about the inclination of our minds. Our problem is that we demand of miracles what they cannot provide. We cast a skeptical eye upon miracles as empirical phenomena requiring not only empirical proof but, more importantly, our own personal experiential verification. We want miracles for ourselves, immediately and directly, without which we will not accept them. The Scriptures actually speak to this situation. “What you did in Capernaum, do also for us” was said in Nazareth about Jesus whom they thought belonged to them and was accountable to them on their terms. “Is not this Joseph’s son?” they said. The attitude there was “Jesus do for us”, not, as Mary says “do whatever he tells you”. There is all the difference in the world between those two perspectives.

But miracles without the glory and the teaching are not miracles. Miracles as simply subject to rational explanation are not miracles. They cease to be “signs and wonders” of the glory of God and his teaching. They become, instead, events that are explicable, humanly speaking, without God. There may be some sort of wonder, but not God’s wonder. And even the aspect of wonder is only appearance. Miracles, in this view, only seem to be wonders but really aren’t. Without God, they cease to be miracles. Paradoxically, this obscures the greater wonder upon which miracles also depend, namely, the miracle of creation. All the great spiritual teachers recognize the great wonder of creation itself which, again, as a miracle is really all about God. Theologically speaking, our knowledge of nature and the natural world is incomplete without God, the cause and principle of the world.

Yet, for all our skepticism about miracles, we will have our wonders. Our desire for miracles is great, if not insatiable. How else do you explain the utter (and desperate) folly of buying lottery tickets? And so there may be a believing in miracles but not in God for whom miracles are part of his glory and part of his teaching. In wanting “signs and wonders” for ourselves, we want them without God. We want them apart from the will and purpose of God. That’s the problem.

Therein lies the greatest danger with miracles. They are about power and power enthralls us. But power without wisdom is diabolical. When miracles are not seen as the manifestations of divine power, they are separated as well from the wisdom of God. We want miracles as a power over whatever limitations or circumstances confront us; in short, a flight from the realities of sickness and death, of famine and want, of frustration and despair, of wickedness and sin, and, equally, as a flight into the indeterminacy of mere existence. But, for what end? Apart from the glory and the teaching of God, there is no end. Power without wisdom is deadly folly. It is a kind of love without reason.

For us, technology is perhaps the closest parallel to the miracles of the Gospel. Technology is a kind of human miracle whose power holds us in its thrall. It offers the tantalizing suggestion of the overcoming of all the limitations of human life. It tempts us with the idea that somehow we are already gods. But, for what end? In lieu of the question, there is simply the stark result: a utilitarian domination of the world which destroys nature and enslaves humanity. Our self-ordained ends or purposes reveal limitations which we cannot escape.

The ambiguity of technology is that it is neither simply benign nor altogether malign. It is simply incomplete. It is not a true end in itself. When that is forgotten, or denied, then it becomes deadly and destructive, indeed diabolical.

For the ancient Greeks, Prometheus, who brought the gifts of the technical arts to mankind, had to be bound by a greater force externally imposed. Technology had to be limited by the power of a political wisdom which could address the question, “for what end?” For us, technology has to be limited, too, but not simply by the imposition of an external and restraining principle. Rather, it has to be limited from within, from within the discovery of its own limitations by each of us. There is a wisdom which must be found through technology and not simply apart from it; a wisdom which is ethical, first and foremost.

Thus, the miracles of the Gospels have much to teach us. The power of God manifest in the miracles of Christ is perfectly at one with the wisdom of God. Far from being a mere display of power, they teach us something about the will and purpose of God for us. In the healings and in the provisions for human needs, they show us that our end is in God and through his being in us.

His glory commands our worship. His teaching bids our study. The miracles belong to God and not God to miracles. They are not the proof and measure of God. They belong to the will and purpose of God, to the manifestation of his divine power perfectly at one with his divine wisdom. For such is his glory, the radiating splendor of the being and truth of God. It belongs to the proclamation of the divine teaching that our end is in God through the power of his grace at work in us. If we will be teachable.

In Christ, the enduring miracles of God are made startlingly visible. The stories of Creation and salvation history are wonderfully concentrated in Jesus. The Gospel bears witness to how the miracles are already for us, namely in their teaching. They show us in exemplary fashion what God wants for us: the healing and restoration of our bodies and souls. Yet even more, as today’s Gospel proclaims, they show us our delight and enjoyment in the goodness of God, more good than good, like the good wine which has been saved for the last.

“This beginning of signs did Jesus in Cana of Galilee and manifested forth his glory.”

Amen.

One day, while I was reading it, the realization struck me like a thunderclap that modernity is all about rebellion: against God, against restraint, against the limits of the human condition, and even against reality itself—and that Sade, the personification and most radical philosopher of that revolt, is the apotheosis of modernity. Sade’s libertines proclaimed seething hatred of God and Christianity, a hatred motivated by rejection of religion’s fetters on appetite and conduct. The rejection of God reduces existence to a material, determinist Nature, and reduces man to a material, determined being, who in effect has no moral responsibility for his conduct. Man, Sade also preached, is an extreme egoist, naturally cruel, isolated from others, bent on his own gain and enjoyment. To such beings in such a universe, good and evil are meaningless. Nihilism liberates: this is the point, and the motive, of Sade’s outpourings, and indeed of all modern nihilism and hatred of religion.

Of necessity, modernity, like Sade, denigrates Christianity.

All of the West’s impious efforts to destroy an existing civilization and create a secular utopia—the French Revolution, the Soviet tyranny, the Nazi tyranny—delegitimized and persecuted Christianity. Two aspects of human conduct, in which the conflict between piety and impiety is crucial, are crime and sexuality. Minimizing crime and imposing social controls on sexual conduct are vital to civilized life. The evidence is clear that thinkers promoting leniency for criminals and accepting sexual transgression and perversion realized, like Sade, that religion was the obstacle to their aims, and attacked it relentlessly.

Genuine conservatism, argues Mr Attarian, must be religious.  Libertarianism cannot be considered conservative, for they are fundamentally opposed to each other.

As Theodore Dalrymple recently put it: “To regret religion is to regret Western civilization”.

I had never heard of John Attarian before reading his article cited here, which, although published in 2002, was only recently posted on the internet.  Further research reveals that he died unexpectedly in 2004. Requiescat in pace.

Rev Masih maintains that he and his guest were merely defending biblical teaching.  He plans to take legal action, accusing the radio station of religious discrimination against both himself and Asian Christian listeners.

After a lively religious debate, the radio station management took exception to the content of the discussion. The Rev Masih was accused of not being balanced enough on air. However, Awaz FM refuses to detail anything specific he said that might have offended its listeners.

The Rev Masih and his co-presenter Afzal Umeed were discussing the views of a prominent Muslim speaker, Zakir Naik, who the Rev Masih accuses of belittling the Christian faith on Peace TV, a digital channel.

The Rev Masih says that Mr Umeed asked Asif Mall, a Christian on-air guest, about Mr Naik’s remarks. Mr Mall said Mr Naik’s comments showed a lack of knowledge of the Bible and of the Koran.

In particular, Mr Mall disputed a claim by Mr Naik that Jesus Christ was not the only prophet to be “the way, the truth and the life”.

The radio station denies Rev Masih’s claims but refused to answer specific questions.

h/t: The Christian Institute

I received the benefit of that influence when I was a relatively new Christian in the early 1980s. I first encountered him in the pages of National Review, where he wrote a regular column on religion. In 1984, his book The Naked Public Square helped me to understand the place of Christianity in politics and public life. Also about that time, Fr Neuhaus launched the indispensable periodical First Things.

He was a leader in the cause of promoting intelligent, classical Christian thinking in the contemporary decadent West. His passing is a great loss to us, but he is now in the care of our Lord and Saviour.   May light perpetual shine upon him.

This video is from a CBC interview of December 2007.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFwMZKtHiaE[/youtube]

Christians for Fair Witness on the Middle East (“Fair Witness”) is greatly disturbed by the escalating violence in Israel and Gaza and the tragic loss of innocent Palestinian and Israeli lives. As many church leaders in the U.S. demand an immediate cease fire however, we challenge them to acknowledge not only the human suffering, but the political realities in the region.
[…]
“Maybe people don’t realize what has been going on in Israel for the past seven years,” says Rev. James Noland, Senior Pastor of Reveille United Methodist Church in Richmond, Virginia. “I was in Sderot in October 2007. Six Qassam rockets hit the town just before we arrived. We saw three blimps in the air that circulate 24 hours a day seven days a week to detect incoming rockets. When the sirens go off people have twenty seconds to get into a bomb shelter. Kids couldn’t sleep, everyone was afraid to leave their homes, people died, people had their legs blown off. It was especially disturbing to see these Qassams up close — they were built not to cause damage to structures, but to kill and maim human beings. It was terrifying. How many years are people supposed to live like that before putting a stop to it?”

Sounds like a good question to me.

The leadership of Christians for Fair Witness on the Middle East includes Roman Catholics, Jews, and mainline Protestants. Most are ordained ministers.

h/t: Brutally Honest and Alice the Camel

One might think that Mr Cosh would learn from his publicly exposed blunders, but apparently not, for he spouts the same nonsense today.

I am amazed a hundred times a year that pro-life Christians get away with claiming that they stand on eternal principles when it comes to abortion, even though, if you prod them, they […] will admit that it was the progress of scientific understanding which obligated them to suddenly promote abortion in the panoply of sins, circa 1968.

This is one pro-life Christian who will admit no such thing, even if prodded. Based on what he wrote last July, Douglas Farrow would appear to be another. I doubt we’re the only two.

In fact, Christians have considered abortion a grave sin for two millennia.  The 1st-century Christian document known as the Didache, or the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, says:

[T]hou shalt not kill a child by abortion, neither shalt thou slay it when born;

The second-century Christian apologist Athenagoras wrote:

[T]hose women who use drugs to bring on abortion commit murder …

Other Christians who view abortion as murder include Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria (both 2nd century), Sts Basil the Great and Ambrose (4th century), Sts John Chrysostom and Jerome (5th century), and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (20th century).

Says Gerald Bonner, former Professor of Theology, Durham University: ”Tertullian’s assertion that abortion was forbidden to Christians represents the universal teaching of the early Church”.

Mr Cosh seems to think that abortion presents no special moral dilemmas. He is, of course, free to hold that view, but it is simple ignorance to continue to insist that Christians found abortion equally unproblematic until forty years ago—especially when one has already been corrected by a professor of religious studies well-acquainted with the historical references.

Cosh’s article of last July is available online, as is Farrow’s rejoinder. The comments by Cosh and Farrow are appended to the latter.

UPDATE (3 Jan.): Charles Lewis, a man who actually knows something about religious views on abortion, takes Cosh to the woodshed.

If one may ask, what business do African countries, together with their stinking leaders, have in rejoicing over Obama’s victory at the U.S. poll when we know in our hearts of hearts that we will never allow the kind of system that has produced Obama in U.S. election to be replicated in our own land?

Or, are we under a delusion that, with Obama’s presidency, African countries shall wake up one morning, like the fabled Alice in Wonderland, and find all the good things of life in sufficiency for all as obtain in the western world, even while our leaders and people continue in their culture of greed, corruption, ethnic hostilities and all such practices antithetical to the dictate of modern civilization?
[…]
We must stop deceiving ourselves. It is high time we told ourselves a few home truths. Whatever Obama is today or stands for, he owes it all to the American society.

If Barack Obama had been raised in Africa, says Mr Agbiti, the best he could aspire to would be a faculty position at “one of our glorified secondary schools, called university”. He could hardly have risen to power in today’s Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, etc.

The American society that shaped Obama to become what he is to day places a higher premium of kinship of ideas over and above that of blood.

By implication, Africa is held back by over-emphasis on the kinship of blood. That sounds remarkably similar to what The Times of London columnist Matthew Parris said earlier today. Mr Parris’s considered suggestion for improvement of African society is encouragement of Christian faith.

Now a confirmed atheist, I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

I used to avoid this truth by applauding – as you can – the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It’s a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

But this doesn’t fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

The faith, argues Mr Parris, is even more important than the help because it changes people. Christianity liberates believers; it takes away their fears; it makes them honest, dependable, and self-reliant. Christians he has observed in Africa tend to respect the individual above the collective, which is often governed by tribalism and power politics.

Economic support by itself does not change people. Billions of dollars in government-to-government foreign aid over many decades has enriched a minuscule and powerful elite, but it has not fundamentally improved the living conditions of the vast majority of Africans.

Christianity, by contrast, has improved the lives of many of those it has touched. I think there’s a connection between that fact and the persecution that authoritarian rulers in Africa and elsewhere inflict on believers.

h/t: Transfigurations

Sic transit gloria mundi — thus passes away the glory of the world, the old Latin phrase puts it. In 2008, the glory of money took the biggest hit. The economic ground shifted beneath our feet, and so much that was solid, so much that was powerful, so much that was thought stable, has passed away.
[…]
The fundamental Christian telling of history is that we are always in crisis to a greater or lesser degree. Man is estranged from God and consequently estranged from his neighbour; therefore he lurches through history trying to avoid one calamity or another. The Christian believer knows we need Christmas.

We need Christmas because, contrary to a certain messianic politics that took hold of so many this past year, the simple answer is that we can’t save ourselves. The things we make and manufacture, whether automobiles or mortgage-backed securities, are not the stuff of salvation.

“Yes, we can” is good politics but bad theology. “No, we can’t” won’t inspire a campaign rally, but the realization that the glory of this world is constantly passing away is the first step in the search for another, more enduring glory.

Read the whole thing.

The “old Latin phrase” originated in the 15th century Christian classic by Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ. Here’s a snippet from Book 1, Chapter 3:

If men used as much care in uprooting vices and implanting virtues as they do in discussing problems, there would not be so much evil and scandal in the world, or such laxity in religious organizations. On the day of judgment, surely, we shall not be asked what we have read but what we have done; not how well we have spoken but how well we have lived.

Tell me, where now are all the masters and teachers whom you knew so well in life and who were famous for their learning? Others have already taken their places and I know not whether they ever think of their predecessors. During life they seemed to be something; now they are seldom remembered. How quickly the glory of the world passes away! If only their lives had kept pace with their learning, then their study and reading would have been worth while.

Amen. Lord, have mercy.

The theme of Advent is holy watching and holy waiting; that presents a challenge because it’s very hard to wait upon God. Advent is also a time of questioning. Fr Curry ponders the questions asked by two witnesses of Christ, the Virgin Mary and St Thomas. As he quoted Thomas Aquinas, “The doubting of Thomas brings us the greatest certainty”, I understood for the first time why the Feast Day of St Thomas occurs during Advent.

“Behold, the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world”

We have come full circle, it may seem. Today’s Gospel ends with where we began on The Sunday Next Before Advent, itself a day of endings and beginnings. In a way, Advent, by which I mean both the season and the doctrine, captures the whole of our lives in faith.

It signals the coming of God towards us. That is the first note. It signals as well the heightened awareness on our part about the coming of God towards us. That is the second note. Advent is simply and entirely holy waiting and holy watching, our watching and our waiting upon God, upon the God who comes to us with grace and salvation, the one who comes “with healing in his wings,” as Malachi puts it. He comes with forgiveness. “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.”

Such is our beginning and our ending to which this day and week of the deepest darkness of night would bring us. It would bring us to Christ, the Lamb of God, the Word and Son of the Father who comes to us as the Son of Mary, the Word made flesh, the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world whose birth marks the beginning of the way of sacrificial love for us and in us.

We can only watch and wait. It is the hardest thing for us, I fear, and yet, as always, the hardest things are the things most worth doing. We watch and wait upon God. There is our heightened awareness, our heightened expectancy, all of which are concentrated for us on this day. We wait in the circle of light, the circle of our watching, which brings us to the light of salvation and glory, the light of God with us, our Emmanuel, Christ the true and only light.

But what makes watching and waiting so hard? Because it is a watching and a waiting upon God. Without that all our advent preparations for Christmas are but tinsel and wrap, sounding brass and clanging cymbal, empty show and vain illusion. We are, I fear, too much with ourselves and not enough with God.

There is nothing so hard as watching and waiting upon God, and nothing more necessary. It is an activity of the highest order. It is anything but passivity, as if we were mere accidents waiting to happen. No. The challenge of Advent is a peculiarly modern challenge, the challenge not to be defined just by “what has happened to me.” The challenge is to rise above the comfortable but, ultimately, demeaning culture of victimhood. The challenge is to put aside the endless whine of ‘what about me?’ The challenge is to find ourselves in the story, in the advent of the Word.

I know; it is hard. It is hard to watch and wait because we get so caught up in our own concerns. They are very real, of course. It is hard because there are hardships and heart-aches, sorrows and sadnesses. There are the struggles and pains of the break-up of families and marriages; there are the worries of parents about their children; there are the anxieties of the aged in the face of death and dying. And yet, these are the realities that the Advent Word of God addresses.

There is no joy simply in our worries and anxieties and no advent because we will not watch and wait upon God. And yet, to do so is to wait upon what ennobles and dignifies our humanity, upon what raises up and restores us; in short, upon what actually occasions rejoicing. It is all the note of this day.

This day of watching and waiting upon God signals, in a nutshell, the whole of our lives in faith. We wait upon God. We come to him for light knowing only too well all the forms of our darkness. This waiting is the highest activity of our souls. We can do no more and, yet, it is all his doing in us in prayer and praise, in watching and waiting upon God. But in so doing we shall find our “rejoicing in the Lord,” as the Epistle so wonderfully reminds us.

This is not the naïveté of wishful thinking. In this watching and waiting there is the holy questioning which gives us, at the very least, a framework of understanding about the one who comes. Last week we had occasion to consider two figures of the spiritual landscape of Advent, namely, Mary and John the Baptist. And of course, the witness of John the Baptist is directly before us today. But consider for a moment, Mary and Thomas and their interrelation in the context of holy questioning. Thomas, sometimes called “doubting Thomas”, is also a figure of the Advent, and in a most instructive way.

Mary asks “how shall this be, seeing I know not a man?” Her question expresses the great wonder and miracle of grace, namely, that God wills to be man through woman (to redeem both sexes, incidently, as one Anglican divine observed). By the necessity of salvation, this is something beyond the ordinary course of human life. Her question and ensuing response to the Angelic messenger ushers us into an understanding of the wonder of it all.

Thomas, too, on the darkest and the longest night of all, questions the reality of the Risen Christ. It may seem to be an Easter story, and it is, but his feast day is actually in Advent, on Dec. 21st. It being a Sunday this year, it is transferred to Tuesday. In his commemoration, however, we see the deep interplay of Advent and Lent, of Christmas and Easter. As another Thomas puts it, the great medieval theologian, Thomas Aquinas, “the doubting of Thomas brings us the greatest certainty.” How wonderful that through doubt we arrive at a kind of certainty! It is, as if the two Thomas’ anticipate Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, whose method of doubt leads to an inquiry into what can be known indubitably.

The apostle Thomas simply wants to know the truth of the God made man, to know for himself that the one who has come and whom he has followed throughout the dust of Palestine, the one who has said “I am the truth and the life,” is indeed the living truth who has overcome the darkness of death. His questioning is not the negative doubting of our comfortable, arrogant and false skepticisms, the doubting which asserts the denial of the possibility of knowing anything at all. No. His questioning opens him and us to the wonder of it all, the wonder of “My Lord, and My God.” In a way, his words capture our sense of wonder at the birth of Christ. We shall behold the babe lying in the manger and cry out “My Lord and My God.” Such motions of divine grace are also there for us in the devotional approach to the sacrament. “My Lord and My God!”

“Be not faithless but believing,” Jesus says to Thomas. “The Holy Spirit  shall come upon thee, and the power of the most high overshadow thee”…  “Behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb,” the Angel Gabriel says to Mary. Their questions open us out to the light of the one who comes, if only we will watch and wait in the mode of holy questioning.

The questions of Advent reach a crescendo of intensity on this day in the barrage of questions which belong to “the witness of John.” “Who are thou?” the Priests and Levites from Jerusalem ask him in a kind of genuine puzzlement. “What do you say about yourself?” He turns their questions about himself into a witness to the one who comes. “This is the witness of John.” John has learned through questioning, too, it seems. “Art thou he that should come or do we look for another?” he had asked and was given, if not an answer, at least a way of understanding about prophecy fulfilled and about the nature of true human desiring.

In the logic of Advent, we have come full circle. We come to him whom John points out, “Behold the lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.” And in him is all our rejoicing.

Amen.

Immediately after the show was aired, Mr Mali began receiving e-mails and adverse publicity from offended Muslims calling for him to apologise.

“In recent weeks my program has come under fire from Muslims as they have started asking aggressive questions about the validity of the Bible, the deity of Christ and the nature of God in Christianity,” Ashar Mall told ANS.

He said Daniel Scott [sic] very academically dealt with the subject without being aggressive or insulting to the religion of Islam, but some leaders within the Muslim community have started to threaten Venus TV and him.
[...]
Pakistan based Urdu newspaper “Daily Jang” reporter, Obaid-ur-Rehman, contacted community leaders and Muslim scholars in the UK who expressed their anger over the airing of the disputed TV program.

An e-mail from a representative of the Chairman of Birmingham’s Central Mosque threatened legal action if an apology is not made.

We watch Venus TV because you produce programms for all communities, As our religious month of Ramadan just passed and we are celebrating Eid festival, Unfortunately this morning we saw a Live show between 8:00 -9:00 am, where Christians discussing Islam, and producing wrong information about our deen (religion). This is very disappointing and extremely un-acceptable, today is Juma (Friday), we will discuss this matter after juma prayer in our Birmingham central mosque, and will take this matter further.
[. . .]
We would like Venus TV to apologies for this heart breaking programme and stop if any repeat transmission of this programme is in schedule. Their compliance officer should perform their duty and check the recording of this programme and contents discussed in this programme, and stop this anti Islam propaganda.

In 2002, Daniel Scot and his colleague Danny Nalliah were charged with violating Australia’s hate speech laws after holding a seminar on the teachings of Islam. They were initially found guilty, but the Supreme Court of Victoria overturned the decision on appeal—in December 2006.

A MEDIA preoccupation with sensationalist critics of religion drowns out the many intellectual voices who claim a significant place for Christian thinking in today’s western civilisation, it was argued last night.

Delivering the annual CS Lewis lecture in Dublin, Dr Greg Clarke of Macquarie University in Sydney said there was immense scholarly interest in whether or not the Christian understanding of humanity, the world and God was basic to social good.

Dr Clarke cited the example of German philosopher and public intellectual Jürgen Habermas, who for decades argued that religion belonged on the margins of modern society but has now concluded that Christian thought should be at its centre.

Habermas acknowledged that the values held dear in a globalising world, such as human rights, liberty of conscience or social democracy, spring from Judeo-Christian thinking, he said.

“Even if a society wanted to ‘outgrow Christianity’, says Habermas, it would struggle to know where to go next.”

Clarke contends that mature thinking must recognise Christianity’s importance in Western civilisation.

Dr Greg Clarke is Director of Macquarie Christian Studies Institute and a founding director of the Centre for Public Christianity in Sydney.