In his latest  Newsweek column, Fareed Zakaria discusses the views of people who think that President Obama’s call for a new global cooperation on nucelar disarmament is futile, even silly.  As Zakaria characterizes this viewpoint, it assumes that nations like Russia and China are too self-interested ever to find genuine common ground. To ask them genuinely to cooperate is as ridiculous, as Zakaria puts it,  as inviting the leaders of these nations  to “all hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya.’”

Singing  “Kumbaya” is being held up quite a bit these days as something to be ridiculed. When Rahm Emanuel was asked by a reporter  a while back about reports of tensions within President Obama’s top leadership team, Emanuel denied the rumors. “Of course, it’s not like we’re all sitting around singing ‘Kumbaya,’” he said; but no serious conflicts.

I don’t get it. What is it about sing “Kumbaya” that deserves to be ridiculed? For me,  the song brings up an image of teenagers gathered around the bonfire on the last night of church camp. The kids have had their week of swimming, hiking, games and flirtations. And now, for a brief moment, they are in a reflective mood. Some of them are thinking with gratitude about the unique camaraderie that happens at summer camps. Others may be entertaining deeper thoughts, about what their lives are all about.  They want the moment to last, and they are asking for a visitation to make that happen: “Come by here, my Lord.  Someone’s singing. Someone’s praying. Come by here.”

Not all that bad, as teenage moods and experiences go.  Why knock it? What makes people point to it as an example of phony unity?

Truth be told, when I see the sword-rattling that often characterizes the gatherings of international leader—and the acrimonious debates within our own public arenas in North America—I am strongly inclined to cry out in despair: “Come by here, my Lord, come by here!”

No one is ever going to ask me to lead devotions at a United Nations session or an Obama Cabinet.  But if it were to happen—if it were—I know exactly what I would do. I would ask them all to join hands and sing “Someone’s crying, Lord! Someone’s crying!  Kumbaya!”  It would do them all good. And the Lord might even respond and actually “kumbaya”!

Someone wrote this week to ask me for the reference for a story he heard me tell a few years ago in my address at a Fuller Commencement ceremony. If having other speakers wanting to use a story from one of your speeches is a sign that you got your point across, then this particular story is a winner. I have been asked about it more than any other illustration I have ever used. I agree that it needs wider circulation, so here it is.

It is a story told by Albert Raboteau in his fine book—one that has had a profound impact on my thinking about many issues—Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (Oxford University Press, 1978).  Raboteau shows how the Christian slaves of the Old South typically had a deep reverence for the Bible, so much so that even when they could not read they found ways to make the Bible a central focus of their devotional lives. One young woman, for example, when she fled from her captivity, took a Bible with her. She had memorized key passages of Scripture, and had asked her mistress to mark the pages where the passages were found. Hiding in forests and swamps from her would-be captors, she turned to the marked pages and whispered the passages.

But here is the story that I so often get asked about. A young illiterate slave woman, a nursemaid to her master’s family, enlisted the white children to teach her how to recognize the word “Jesus.”  Having gained possession of a Bible, she would regularly find a quiet place where she would turn the pages of the Bible, running her fingers up and down the pages, until she found the name of Jesus.

My own point in using that story—often in graduation addresses—is to encourage Christian students to cultivate what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur labeled “the Second Naivete.” That young woman was exhibiting the First Naivete, in her case an expression of a simple love for Jesus Christ. The Second Naivete, however, is a “post-critical” state of mind. It is a naivete that we can come back to on the other side of sophisticated critical reflection.

I admire that young slave woman. I want her kind of simple love of her Lord, and her deep conviction that what the Bible is all about is Jesus. For those of us who have passed, as Christians, through the disciplined thinking afforded by programs in higher education—we can’t simply forget all that we have learned: the questions, the times of doubts, the wrestling with various challenges to our faith. In the end, though, we need to cultivate the Second Naivete. This means, for me, that the slave woman had it right. In the end, the Bible is all about trusting and following Jesus, the One who loved us so much that he came to live and die for the likes of us, doing for us what we could never do for ourselves.

Come to think of it, that young woman’s devotional exercise might be a good one for us to engage in periodically—turn the pages of the Bible, run our fingers down the pages, and don’t pause until we have found Jesus!

There is a Bavinck revival going on in some theological circles in North America. Well maybe not exactly a re-vival, since we would have had to have a “vival” at one time in order to “re-“ it now. To be sure, Herman Bavinck has always been an honored name in the Dutch Calvinist community here. But up to now, only a small number of works by the 19th century theologian have been accessible by folks who could not read him in Dutch.

That has changed. A decade or so ago, a Bavinck Translation project was launched and now all four hefty volumes of his Reformed Dogmatics are available in English, published by Baker Books: Vol. 1, Prolegomena; Vol. 2, God and Creation; Vol. 3, Sin and Salvation in Christ; and Vol. 4, Holy Spirit, Church and New Creation.  A smaller work, Essays on Religion, Science and Society, shows Bavinck’s amazing breadth; he goes into impressive detail on, among other topics,  evolutionary theory, the unconscious, adolescent development, political thought and aesthetics.

Bavinck was the younger colleague of Abraham Kuyper, and together they developed the perspective known today as “neo-Calvinism.” Bavinck differed from Kuyper, however, in two important respects. One is that he stuck with a carefully pursued scholarly agenda. Kuyper was a public theologian without peer, engaging in theological reflection on-the-run, as the leader of a political party, a founder of a denomination, writing editorials in his newspapers, and the like. Bavinck, on the other hand, worked almost exclusively in an academic setting, first at a theological school in Kampen, and then at Amsterdam’s Free University.

The second difference is more substantial. Bavinck’s tone was more moderate, and he treated views with which he disagreed with much charity—unlike Kuyper, who often came across as a polemicist. Bavinck’s kinder and gentler orthodoxy holds out much promise for us in North America, especially since his works are being assigned these days to students in a variety of seminaries on the more conservative end of the Reformed and Presbyterian communities.

Take his comments about Islam. He observes, in his Prolegomena volume, that “in the past the [Christian] study of religions was pursued exclusively in the interest of dogmatics and apologetics.” This meant, he says, that Mohammed and others “were simply considered imposters, enemies of God, accomplices of the devil.” Now that these perspectives are becoming “more precisely known,” however, “this interpretation has proven to be untenable”—we do well to search for the ways, he insists, in which such perspectives display “an illumination by the Logos, a working of God’s Spirit.”

And here he is, in a little book, The Certainty of Faith, on the “works righteousness” associated in Calvinist minds with Catholicism:

[W]e must remind ourselves that the Catholic righteousness by good works is vastly preferable to a protestant righteousness by good doctrine. At least righteousness by good works benefits one’s neighbor, whereas righteousness by good doctrine only produces lovelessness and pride.  Furthermore, we must not blind ourselves to the tremendous faith, genuine repentence, complete surrender and the fervent love for God and neighbor evident in the lives and work of many Catholic Christians. The Christian life is so rich that it develops its full  glory not just in a single form or within the walls of one church.

Quite a friendly tone, for a Calvinist writing six decades before the reforms of Vatican II.

Indeed, wise thoughts all.  If that way of being “orthodox Reformed” were to take hold here in North America, we might have a real revival on our hands!