I’m a year behind in watching Lost. I’m in the middle of last season’s DVDs in my time each morning on the exercise bike. So I did not watch the grand finale. But I’ve heard a lot of talk about it around the Fuller campus. And much of it is theological: purgatory, salvation, good and evil, crucifixes and church sanctuaries. All of that is fine. I’ll probably have theological thoughts of my own when I catch up with everyone else.Lost lends itself nicely to that kind of theological discussion—maybe even a little too nicely. But right now I’m more caught up in thinking about the series finale I did watch after faithfully viewing every episode for eight seasons: “24.”The Jack Bauer saga was a great run. And there were at least some hints at theological themes at the end. The really evil guy, former president Logan, was trying to convince President Taylor, herself involved in a terrible cover-up, that the only hope the two had of not having their evil deeds exposed was to do away with Jack Bauer. Hearing this speech, I pushed the pause button on the recording and got off my exercise bike to write down the relevant phrases. If Bauer lives, said Logan, he will not give up in his fight against the folks responsible for the cover-up: “He will rise up out of the deepest hole in the ground” to make things right.President Taylor eventually saw the error of her ways and public repented. What brought her to her moment of truth was a recorded message from Jack, in which he expressed the deep conviction that a truly “lasting peace” can come only with “trust” and “honesty.”
Not bad for a character widely criticized for having an end-justifies-the-means approach to fighting evil. Of course, Jack did not die in the end, so we don’t have to look for him to “rise up” again from some deep place in the earth. And that’s a good thing. For one thing, it means that we may yet see Jack and Chloe again, this time in a full-length film. More importantly, it would have been yet another wasted death. There was really no chance of a real “rising up” if Jack had died. It’s already been done—and with a genuine guarantee of an ultimate “lasting peace.”
In a recent column published in the magazine The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier criticized President Obama for the kind of language the president uses when he discusses Islam. Wieseltier makes no secret of his own commitment to a secularist outlook when he refers to “Obama’s creepy habit of addressing Muslims in religious terms.” What Mr. Obama’s rhetoric fails to recognize, says Wieseltier, is that the main conflict relating to Islam these days is not one between the Muslim religion and the rest of society. Rather it is the battle within Islam, between those who focus exclusively on religious categories and those who are working toward the “secularization” of Muslim life. And Wieseltier is not subtle in telling us which segment of contemporary Islam he finds “creepy.”
My guess is that Mr. Wieseltier would also find me and many of my fellow evangelicals to be creepy. Like Muslims of deep conviction, we oppose much that is associated with the idea of “secularization” in the mind of someone like Leon Wieseltier. It is important to say right off, though, that there are key elements of the process of secularization that we ought to affirm. Where things go wrong is when secular-ization, however, becomes secular-ism, especially in the attempt to consign religion to a purely “private” realm, one where religious beliefs and values have no legitimate place in dealing with public matters. Thus, the legitimate advocacy of “the separation of church and state” is transformed into the misguided insistence on the separation of religion and public life. And here is where many of us as evangelicals want to join our Muslim friends in protesting that kind of confusion.
Ian Buruma recognizes this commonality in his recent book, Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents. In discussing the hostility that many in Europe worry about in experiencing the growth of Muslim communities in their midst, he sees that opposition as having much to do with the way in which the Muslim presence is seen as a significant force for resisting the secularization of life in the West. And then he makes special mention of evangelicalism: the evangelical movement in North America, he says, has much in common on this score with Muslims in Europe.
Like our Muslim counterparts, our religious beliefs are for each of our communities matters of deep conviction. And each of our communities worries much about the ways in which many of the dominant patterns of the larger culture—especially the larger culture of the West—pose a serious threat to the maintenance of these deep convictions.
The huge challenge that we evangelicals face these days in this regard, then, is how do we live out our faith in a pluralistic society in which we acknowledge the rights of our fellow citizens—people whose values, beliefs and lifestyles we often strongly disagree with—to acknowledge nonetheless their rights to enjoy the same freedoms that we claim for ourselves? And this is a topic about which Muslims and evangelicals have much to discuss together.
Someone recently talked about what are seen these days as the failures of the kind of liberation theology that got much attention in the 1970s and ’80s. I agreed with many of the criticisms. But I balked a bit at the suggestion that the Latin American liberation theologians simply superimposed a “political ideology” on Christianity. That certainly was true in some cases. But there were noteworthy exceptions, particularly in what is widely acknowledged to be the classic text of that movement, A Theology of Liberation, by Gustavo Gutierrez.
I often quote Gutierrez as a wise voice on the importance of a contemplative spiritual life. In his book he made it clear that he was aware of the dangers of absolutizing our own favorite political causes, and thereby being highly selective in drawing on those resources of Christianity that are useful in promoting our own pre-established goals. As a corrective to this tendency, he argued that the Christian life must be “filled with a living sense of gratuitousness. Communion with the Lord and with all men is more than anything else a gift.” Furthermore, he contended, prayer, as the means by which we engage in our communion with God, “is an experience of gratuitousness.” Properly understood, prayer is entering into God’s presence with no agenda, with no list of causes that we insist on promoting. Prayer, he says, is a “‘leisure’ action”; it is a “‘wasted’ time, [that] reminds us that the Lord is beyond the categories of useful and useless. God is not of this world.” In our prayerful communion with God we look forward to goals that God has set, ones that can only be fully realized when the Reign of God arrives at the end-time: “Every prophetic proclamation of total liberation is accompanied by an invitation to participate in eschatological joy: ‘I will take delight in Jerusalem and rejoice in my people” (Isa. 65:19). And then this: “[O]ur joy is paschal, guaranteed by the Spirit.” (Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation, Orbis Books, 1973, 206-207)
That’s hard to improve upon as a wonderful call to the self-critical life of prayer!
