Someone pointed out to me that a person posted a review on Amazon of my new book on Mormonism, giving it one star. I checked it out. Here is the full review:

I have not read this yet but have read about the author’s stand on what he believes about Mormonism and he thinks Christians and Mormons have the Same Jesus. If that doesn’t say it all, I do not know what is. This man claims to know what a cult is but does not even recognise one that has been put right in front of his face!!! If you doubt me, read his blog. […] and now if that is not enough. Read his CNN article […] Now, my advice to true born again Christians to save your dollar and no worry he will get rich on the sale of this book by selling it to Mormons. 

I am reminded of Rob Bell’s response to the folks who condemned Love Wins without reading it. He said something like this in an online recording: “Hi, I’m Rob Bell. I am an evangelical. I am not a universalist. And I don’t review books I have not read.”

Well, Earth Day 2012 has come and gone. I did not take part in any events specifically focused on Earth Day concerns—although I did put a bunch of things in the recycling bin. And I thought about a lesson I learned on the very first Earth Day, April 22, 1970.

I was into my second year of full-time teaching, on the Calvin College faculty. The students at Calvin took the idea of an Earth Day quite seriously, and we all gathered—a big enough crowd that we had to use the gymnasium—for a time of worship focusing on God’s concern for creation. There was no Powerpoint in those days, but the students had assembled for viewing a large number of slides, which they showed to the accompaniment of “This is My Father’s World.” After the slide show, my colleague Nicholas Wolterstorff spoke.

Nick commented on the way the slide show had depicted “good” and “bad” scenes, with the former all consisting of rural pastoral-type scenes, and the latter all portrayals of urban blight. Then he asked some profound—and for me, unforgettable—questions: Isn’t there a danger, Wolterstorff asked, of depicting countryside scenes as somehow closer to what God likes best about his creation, with urban life as that which corrupts and distorts what was intended to be good? Shouldn’t Earth Day also look for the ways in which people are working for beauty and justice in cities? What about nicely designed buildings and spaces that promote human flourishing—are they not also ways of glorifying the God who cares about the world he created?

Again, good questions. To pose them, of course, is not to deny the importance of thinking explicitly about plants and animals, rivers and oceans. God does grieve over the ways that we pollute and abuse such things. But cities are also precious in God’s sight.  Indeed, someday a City will descend from the heavens—and “there will no longer be anything accursed” (Rev. 22:3). The psalmist tells us that “the earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof, the world and all who dwell therein.” Cities, and urban life, are a part of that “fulness”—a good thing to remember on Earth Day.

I have a piece on how to be a “worldly Christian” in one of my favorite magazines, from Singapore. You can read it here.

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Marble Faun, Miriam, who struggles much with guilt, is hoping for empathy from her friend Hilda, whom Miriam views as a model of purity. When Hilda backs away from their friendship, Miriam offers this theological assessment of her friend’s incapacity for empathy: “I have always said, Hilda, that you were merciless; for I had a perception of it, even when you loved me best. You have no sin, nor any conception of what it is; and therefore you are so terribly severe. As an angel, you are not amiss; but as a human creature, and a woman among earthly men and women, you need a sin to soften you.”

The Incarnation is God’s softening toward us in our frailty and sinfulness. But God did not “need a sin to soften” himself. He did something much better. He took our humanity upon himself.

Already in ancient Israel, of course, God was seen as having empathy for us in our humanness.

As a father has compassion on his children,
so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him;
for he knows how we are formed,
he remembers that we are dust. (Ps. 103:13-14)

That compassionate grasp of “how we are formed” is the compassion of a Maker. I may love something that I have made—and I may understand it through and through. But I do not yet know what it is like to be that thing. And it is precisely that more intimate knowledge that God gained when the eternal Son entered into our creaturely condition. He came to pay a debt that we could not pay for ourselves. But he did more than that. He came to be the likes of us. “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way,  just as we are—yet was without sin” (Hebrews 4:15).

I have often heard it said on Good Friday that Jesus suffered the deepest agonies on the Cross so that we do not have to suffer those agonies. That is a wonderful piece of good news. But in his suffering he was not only suffering in our place—again, a powerful reality—but he was also suffering with us, in the ways that we suffer.  And that suffering began in the Manger: the outstretched arms of the Baby in Bethlehem are the beginning of what would happen when the Savior stretched out his arms on Calvary.

Unlike Miriam’s depiction of Hilda, Jesus did have a conception of sin. And he did not need to sin himself in order to be softened to sinners like us. There is much mystery in that. But it is a wonderful mystery!

I just read in the Christian Century that John Hick died in February, at the age of 90.  I saw him as an important conversation partner at various times in my own academic pilgrimage. Early on in my teaching days, I assigned his little Philosophy of Religion book to my undergraduate classes. When he started writing about the Incarnation as a “myth” I read him as an interesting thinker to disagree with. Then when he began concentrating on religious pluralism, I often used him as an example, in lectures and articles, as someone whose views had to be challenged.

But I also liked John Hick as a person. While he was teaching at Claremont Graduate University I got to know him personally. He was always gracious—in spite of the fact that he knew that I agreed with those of my Presbyterian friends (including some Fuller colleagues) who actively opposed his quest to have his ordination credentials accepted by a local presbytery.

Well, actually, there was one evening when he wasn’t his usual gracious self toward me. We ran into each other at a convention, and we agreed to have dinner together, just the two of us, at a nearby restaurant. The evening began pleasantly enough, but soon we got into a discussion about our disagreements about what I was insisting is the truth of the gospel. John had been an evangelical in his younger days—a member of InterVarsity during his undergraduate years—and some of my language seemed to trigger a fairly strong reaction on his part.

When the meal was over, we were walking from the restaurant to our convention hotel when I saw a message scrawled on a telephone pole.  The two word message, illuminated by a street light, was “Trust Jesus.” I put one hand on John’s shoulder and pointed with the other. “John,” I said quietly, “I think the Lord is sending us a message.” John’s response was not so quiet: “Oh, I will trust Jesus alright—but not your Jesus, not your Jesus!”

I thought about that encounter when I read about John Hick’s death. And I also thought about what Charles Hodge, the great “Old Princeton” Calvinist, wrote about Friedrich Schleiermacher, in a footnote in his Systematic Theology, after identifying a variety of heresies in Schleiermacher’s theology. Hodge said that, when studying in Germany, he had attended services where Schleiermacher preached, and had been impressed by the German theologian’s love of Christ-centered evangelical hymns. Hodge said that he was sure that Schleiermacher, who had been dead for a few decades, was now singing those hymns in the presence of Jesus.

I have long taken comfort in that kind of openness on Hodge’s part to a wideness in God’s mercy that can overlook some serious theological errors. I’m not always clear how to put that theologically, but since my theology is very close to Hodge’s, I at least hold out some hope for that merciful wideness. Which leads to me to say that if Hodge was right, then I hope that the same Jesus who loved Schleiermacher has also chosen John Hick to sing in the celestial choir.

The Catholic bishops have been upset with President Obama for insisting that Catholic hospitals and universities provide birth control services—including the “morning after” pill that is in effect a means of abortion in their view. Nor have they been placated by the “compromise” the Administration has offered.

I don’t blame the bishops for being outraged. While I don’t share their views on contraception, they are raising important issues in their protests. The fact is that we face serious challenges to religious liberty these days. That is obvious internationally, where Christians are persecuted in many Muslim cultures, where France restricts the rights of Muslim women to wear certain kinds of head coverings, and where people campaign in the Netherlands against kosher practices of slaughtering animals. And in our own country, folks in San Francisco talk about banning circumcision, our national government keeps sending signals that they may start going after those of us in higher education who restrict admissions and hiring practices with reference to sexual orientation behaviors, and Vanderbilt University is barring InterVarsity from their campus.

There is a fundamental issue of rights at stake here. The Obama administration seems to take it for granted that all of this kind of thing has to do with individual freedom—that civil rights is the primary framework for thinking about these matters. What this ignores is the important factor of community rights—the right of religious groups, for example, to configure the collective patterns of their communities in conformity with their deepest convictions.

Let me be candid: I voted for Obama. I am not politically inclined toward Barack-bashing. But on this general subject he and his advisors are clueless—and dangerously so.

I hate to join in with the angry shouting on these developments. We have too much of that in our culture, including our political culture, already. I hope the president realizes that and begins to exercise some wise leadership. He can do so by admitting that he has not listened carefully enough to people who are deeply worried about these threats to religious freedom, and then calling for a calm and sustained conversation, where the issues can be discussed without reducing it all to political power games.

At the recent Prayer Breakfast I heard the president say, with what I saw as candid sincerity, that there was a time in his life when he “came to Christ.” I rejoice in that. And, while I don’t expect him in this situation simply to think about what Jesus would do, acting on how he answers that question, it might be a good start at least to ask how a wise leader, like Lincoln, might address the situation.

The latest issue of the New Oxford Review, which I read to keep up on what is happening on the traditionalist end of the Catholic spectrum, devotes six pages of its letters section to passionate exchanges about Fatima. For those who need a review of the Fatima story: in 1917, three shepherd children, ten-year-old Lucia and her younger cousins, Francisco and Jacinta, claimed to have been visited on several occasions by the Blessed Virgin, in the countryside on the outskirts of the Portuguese town where they lived.

The children reported that Mary gave them three messages: one in which she depicted the horrors of hell; a second in which she promised a world peace to be facilitated by an official church commitment to the conversion of Russia as an expression of devotion to her “Immaculate Heart.” The third message was kept secret by the Vatican for about eight decades, finally being made public in June of 2000. It was interpreted by many to feature a prophecy of the 1981 attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. However, some Catholics have not been satisfied with the official version of the third message. Indeed, there are dissident groups who insist that Rome is being deceptive on the subject. The fact that Lucia, who died a few years ago after spending her adult life as a cloistered Carmelite, seemed to support the Vatican on the subject, only thickened the plot for the conspiracy theorists.

Mary Jane and I talked quite a bit about Fatima during our eighth grade year together in a town near Albany, New York. I had a mild crush on Mary Jane, a very smart Italian Catholic. Our romance—in so far as it was carried on outside of school activities—consisted of long bike rides interspersed by theological arguments about the role of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Mary Jane was a Fatima enthusiast, and she instructed me in the basic narrative.

I still see those discussions as some of the most interesting theological dialogues I have had on the subject of Marian devotion. For one thing, they focused much on the subject of prophecy. I regularly read the Scofield Bible in those days, which meant that I was schooled in the dispensationalist version of end-times scenarios. I was intrigued with Mary Jane’s very different prophetic checklist. Because of those discussions I know better than to take seriously my Catholic theologian friends when they act puzzled about why so many evangelicals are intensely interested in revealed prophecies about the future.

These days I cannot get my Catholic theologian friends to talk about what Mary Jane and I debated then with so much energy. They seem too embarrassed about the whole thing to want to talk about it. For example, in a casual conversation a few years ago, a priest-theologian friend asked me about my summer plans. When I told him that my wife and I were planning a two-week vacation driving around Portugal, his eyes lit up. “I did a visiting lecture tour there a while back,” he said. “A great country!” After he had proceeded to tell me about some places we should not miss, I mentioned that I was hoping that we could visit Fatima. My friend responded by rolling his eyes. “I avoided that place like the plague,” he said, “and I suggest you do the same.”

My guess is that if I had pushed him to explain his desire to distance himself from the Fatima phenomenon his answer would not be unlike those of my evangelical academic colleagues when asked to comment on the Left Behind novels, or on Benny Hinn’s healing crusades. We are embarrassed by what we see as the excesses of popular movements within our own communities. But in my early adolescence my religious world was permeated with “Bible prophecy” speculations. And what fascinated me was my schoolmate’s focus on similar themes, albeit within a very different context. The Virgin Mother had given the three children secrets about what would soon come to pass in the world, my friend informed me in breathless tones. And if I wanted to be a faithful follower of Jesus today, she warned me, I had better pray that I will be on good terms with the Blessed Virgin. I in turn encouraged her to read the Book of Revelation, especially in the version that had Scofield’s notes about end-time matters. I doubt that she took my advice. I did not follow her counsel as she intended, but I have occasionally dipped into writings about the sort of Marian devotion to which my friend introduced me.

The Fatima phenomenon is not high on my theological agenda these days, although I do take special notice when I happen upon the kind of passionate discussion going on in the New Oxford Review. It is a case in point for me for a larger topic: the interest that I have—and I know I am not alone in this—in the strong religious beliefs of folks who are beyond the borders of my own religious subculture. I had some thoughts about this a while back when I read Susan Sontag’s book Regarding the Pain of Others. It was a follow-up to her much discussed work, On Photography, in which she explored the relationship between photographic images and our understanding of the reality that they depict. In her Pain book, she focuses specifically on photographic documents of extreme violence: Brady’s photos of the dead bodies on Civil War battlefields, Nazi death camp scenes, images of Vietnamese youngsters fleeing a napalm attack and of the execution of a Viet Cong captive. She probes the ways in which we are often fascinated, in spite of ourselves, with such images, likening those experience to the fairly ordinary ways in which “images of the repulsive can also allure.” After all, she observes, we all know “that what slows down highway traffic going past a horrendous car crash is not only curiosity. It is also, for many, the wish to see something gruesome.”

Well, actually visiting Fatima—which we did in spite of my priest friend’s warning—was not exactly a gruesome experience for me. But at times it did come close.  I felt like a bit of a voyeur at the shrine, with huge crowds milling around the various booths and worship areas commemorating the appearance of the Virgin. Booth after booth sold life-size wax versions of human body parts, to be thrown into fires as a symbolic request for healing of a specific ailment.

An old woman, all dressed in black, who could hardly walk, got down to crawl on her knees, her eyes closed and hands folded in prayer, for hundreds of yards as she approached one of the many statues of the Virgin. And yet I was fascinated to watch—not unlike the fascination involved in slowing down on the highway to witness the scene of an accident.

In a way, I am sorry to have witnessed all of that. I would rather focus on the memory of two eighth graders—one a Fatima devotee and the other a defender of the Scofield Bible—having energetic discussions together about how to understand God’s workings in our contemporary world.

An ad in the New York Review of Books announces a film—being shown in a few major cities—with the title Paul Goodman Changed My Life. The ad describes the subject of the film as “the most influential man you’ve never heard of,” and A. O. Scott of the New York Times offers the opinion that “the time is surely right for a Goodman revival.”

I’ll reserve the term “revival” for more eternally significant matters, but I would certainly like to see some renewed attention to Goodman’s writings. I read him with great profit in the 1960s and ’70s. I regularly assigned his books Growing Up Absurd (1960) and People or Personnel (1965) as readings for my classes in social philosophy. I even went out of my way to hear him speak on a couple of occasions.

To admit that interest in Goodman’s thought requires some explaining. Goodman, who died in the early 1970s, was a self-proclaimed anarchist who was a mentor to the radical student movement; he was also very open about his active “bi-sexual” lifestyle. For all of that, though, I still claim him as one of the important influences on my own thinking as I was working through some of my own theological views.

Where he was of specific help to me was on the subject of original sin. To be sure, that was not a subject he would claim as within his scope of interests. But Goodman did have a clear sense that there was something deeply wrong with the ways in which human beings dealt with the patterns of our interaction. His “people or personnel” disjunction is a clear example. My favorite Goodman-esque example was the way libraries were run. (I say “were run” here because new technologies have dramatically transformed the way a library functions these days.) Goodman would ask the simple question: Why do we have libraries? And the simple answer was: to make it easy for people to have access to books. Library classificatory systems—the Dewey Decimal System, for example—that kind of thing was invented in order to facilitate the original reason for having libraries at all: books were placed in a prescribed order on neatly arranged shelves so that people could find them easily.

As libraries evolved, though, Goodman would argue, something perverse happened. The maintenance of neatly arranged shelves of books with assigned numbers became the real goal of the library. I heard Goodman tell the story this way. He was convinced that in the university libraries that he frequented, each morning the head librarian would give this speech to the gathered staff: “OK, folks, in a few minutes the enemy will invade, and your job is to make it as difficult as possible to disrupt the organization of this library. Once again today we must do all we can to keep those books lined up on those shelves, where they belong!”

The point was that the originally intended beneficiaries of library services, real people who wanted to read books, had become “personnel,” would-be readers who now posed a threat to the orderly library system. And I like what the example illustrates, even though I see it as unfair to the actual librarians that I know.

What I continue to find helpful in this is the way Goodman’s line of argument illuminates an understanding of the patterned behaviors of our shared sinfulness. Think, for example, of the phenomenon of legalism. Why did God command Sabbath rest? The obvious answer is that resting one day in seven is good for us as human beings. Jesus makes this point in Mark 2:27: “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.” But—to generalize—we often take the Law that God intends for our flourishing and we make conformity to the Law itself as the goal of the Christian life. This reverses the original design. We are seen as serving the Law, rather than as created human beings who have been given Lawful guidance from our Maker about how best to flourish in our humanness.

The title of the new Goodman film does not apply to me. Paul Goodman has not “changed my life.” But he did give me some insights that illuminate for me some enduring and regrettable features of our human condition.

Read a report on my visit to North Korea here.

A friend told me about the time a time when, back in the 1960s, he was asked, as a recent college graduate bound for seminary studies, to address his home congregation—an all-white congregation in the Midwest—about his hopes for studying for the ministry. One thing he mentioned to the congregation was his desire to be more effective as a Christian in working for racial reconciliation, specifically between whites and blacks.

An older member of the congregation was very upset with him for bringing up the issue of race. “You don’t really know what these colored people are like,” the man told him. “I hope that seminary will cure you of these liberal ideas!”

Three years later that same congregation invited my friend to preach. In his sermon he shared with the congregation some positive experiences about racial reconciliation that he had received during an extensive student internship that he had recently served at an all-black inner city church.  Afterward, the same church member was once again critical of what he said about race relations, but this time his complaint was different: “You’re just saying all these nice things about the colored people because you have spent so much time with them. You are not capable of being objective!

My friend found this very frustrating. It is one of those “You can’t win” situations. Either your views about a group are judged to be based on inadequate experience with the group, or you are seen as having too much experience. You’re either ignorant or duped.

I have felt that same kind of frustration recently with regard to my relation to Mormonism. Having published a couple of pieces lately arguing that Mormonism is not a “cult,” I am getting two kinds of angry responses. Some folks insist that I simply do not understand Mormonism. Read Walter Martin, they say. Or watch the video The God-Makers, produced in the early 1980s by Ed Decker and Dave Hunt. Or they recommend books by ex-Mormons who have become evangelicals.

Actually, I am very familiar with all of that. It was precisely my dissatisfaction with the basic approach in that kind of thing that motivated me actually to start talking to Mormons themselves—a sustained conversation that has now been going on for almost a dozen years.

Other folks see that long-term dialogue itself as the real problem. You know them too well, these people tell me. Having spent all those hours with Mormon scholars and church leaders has dulled your ability to see things clearly. They have duped you. Now you are one of their apologists.

It’s hard for folks to dupe you over many hours in discussion with them in a twelve-year period. Those of us involved in dialogue with Mormons have not only listened to what they say to us, we have also listened to what they say to each other. Not only, for example, did Elder Jeffrey Holland, one of “the Twelve” in Salt Lake City, say to me that he believes that Mormons need to put more of a central emphasis on the atoning work of Jesus Christ, completed on the Cross of Calvary—he also has been preaching that at annual General Conferences, to tens of thousands Latter-day Saints.

“You don’t really know them” and “You know them too well” are false choices. The alternative in any relationship with people with whom we disagree on eternally important matters is to listen carefully and patiently, asking questions, discerning patterns of thought—and working diligently not to bear false witness against our neighbors!