Tag Archives: religion

Gunman shoots eight, kills two at Unitarian church

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Yesterday, Jim D. Adkisson allegedly walked into a performance of a children’s musical at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee and shot eight people, two of whom are now dead. Why?

According to a search warrant for Mr. Adkisson’s house filed by the police, during interrogation Mr. Adkisson admitted to the shooting and said “he had targeted the church because of its liberal leanings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country.”

Local news site Knoxnews.com says that police found books by Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage, and Sean Hannity at Adkisson’s house. Of course, those authors right-wing nutjobs didn’t tell Adkisson to shoot Unitarians (at least, not having read their books or absorbed much of their radio and TV shows, I assume they didn’t) – they’ve only made their living comparing the political opposition to terrorists, despots, and the insane. They can’t be responsible for some crazy guy in Tennessee taking it all literally.

My self-righteous fulmination aside, I believe that the people of Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church would appreciate your thoughts and prayers.

Preaching religious tolerance as the Crusades begin

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Harper’s has a fascinating piece on Nicholas of Kues (= Cusa, I think), or Cusanus, a fifteenth-century Roman Catholic cardinal who sought common ground between Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and even Hinduism in the wake of the Ottoman Turks’ conquest of Constantinople, when most of European Christendom was girding for the Crusades. I’d never heard of Cusanus before, but apparently he’s considered a leading theologian of the Renaissance in Continental Europe. And his perspective sounds like it would be invaluable for people of faith in the twenty-first century:

What Cusanus therefore proposes is tolerance. However, it is not the insulting sort of tolerance, which proposes official indifference. Rather it is a tolerance that has its roots in a philosophical commitment to the search for truth and a recognition that human frailties and imperfections will always lead to mistakes. “For it is a condition of the earthly human estate to mistake for truth that which is merely long-adhered-to custom, indeed, even to mistake this for a part of nature,” Cusanus writes (habet autem hoc humana terrena condicio quod longa consuetudo, quæ in naturam transisse accipitur, pro veritate defenditur.)

Sir John Templeton, RIP

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Sir John Templeton, billionaire investor turned philanthropist, died today. I mainly knew him for his creation of the Templeton Foundation, which aimed to find scientific approaches to spiritual topics. (Think studies of the effect of prayer on life expectancy, or the neurobiology of meditation.) As both a scientist and a Christian, I disagree with Templeton’s blithe assurance that faith could be quantified; but I wouldn’t join Slate deputy editor David Plotz in calling him a full-bore crank. At the very least, Templeton started from the assumption that faithfulness is not incompatible with a scientific worldview, and that’s a perspective the world needs these days.

Evangelism experienced

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At the tail end of the Evolution 2008 conference, I bumped into a character from my childhood in conservative Christian country: I got evangelized. I was hanging out with two colleagues from another lab at UI, whom I’ll call V and B – we’d had dinner, and were sitting on a bench in the park around the University of Minnesota alumni center, thinking about going for a beer once the sun set. When up come two fresh-faced undergraduate-looking types, and one of them says he wants to ask us some questions “for his blog.”

I smelled an overly-friendly rat immediately, and I think B did, too, as he’s another Mennonite-turned-biologist. V is a good secular Frenchwoman, and was, I think, less prepared to guess where this was going. The first fellow (he never actually introduced himself – I’ll call him the Talker) started in with a painfully obvious line of Socratic questioning about what we thought would happen to us after we died. He pretended great interest in our responses, then started on a we’re-all-sinners-but-good-news-Jesus-came pitch. Except we didn’t play by the script.

The Talker wanted to define sin (in a pretty traditional move) as basically nothing more than violating the Ten Commandments (“You’ve told lies, right?” he said. “So have I.” This is the whole of his argument for original sin.) I happen to object to that kind of moral reasoning. I said as much, pointing out that Jesus gave his disciples a new commandment that fulfills and transcends the Old Testament law; that it’s extremely dangerous to define morality purely in terms of divine fiat; and it’s clear that Jesus expected his disciples to make actual moral judgments, not follow some list of rules.

B pitched in to ask about the ultimate fates of the victims in the recent Chinese earthquake; V. expressed puzzlement. I pointed out the Talker and his friend, who (upon direct inquiry) admitted to being named Noah, seemed to have recently shaved their sideburns, and asked when they’d last had a ham sandwich. (“That’s Catholics,” said Noah. “No,” I said, “That’s Jews.” But it comes from the Old Testament laws they were setting up as the foundation of their theology.) We scientists quoted Scripture and church history and basic, humane moral logic. The Talker responded by trying to drag the conversation back to his script, until, I guess, it became clear we weren’t going to let him. At which point he claimed a pressing appointment, made sure I knew the address of his blog, and left with his wingman.

On the whole, I’d actually thought it was a pretty friendly not-quite-conversation, and I’d fancied we might have made the two of them think a bit. The Talker’s blog, however, indicates otherwise. It’s astonishing how little you can hear when you don’t want to. And it’s maddening that this fellow thinks that he’s practicing Christianity by accosting strangers in public like this. He couldn’t even get to the Good News because he was so busy trying to ram his theology of sin down our throats.

Mennonites and Jesus

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Jesus
Photo by birdfarm.

In a comment a couple posts back, Krista Smith asks, “how much does a Mennonite believe in Jesus?” Which is a great question, and one I’m going to try and tackle here.

(You should also check out Krista’s blog Salt City Food – even if you’re not in Salt Lake City, there are some delicious-looking recipes.)

So what do Mennonites think about Jesus? The short, flip answer is that Mennonites like him a lot. The longer, messier answer is that when this Mennonite says he likes Jesus (and, though he is a product of both Mennonite high school and undergrad, he is not necessarily a representative sample) he means something a bit different from what most Christians mean by that. Mennonites are good trinitarians, mind you, but we understand the crucifixion of Jesus as more than just a sacrifice for our personal sins – we understand it as the example by which we must live, and the lens through which we view the rest of the Bible.

Christus victor

This view was best articulated by the Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder (no relation) in his book The Politics of Jesus. Yoder argued that, in freely submitting to death on the cross, God (in the person of Jesus) subverts and triumphs over the worldly power of the Roman Empire that crucified him – Yoder’s perspective here is related to the “Christus victor”, or Christ victorious, view of the Crucifixion. Furthermore, Yoder interprets the Gospel to mean that Christians are to imitate Jesus by freely submitting themselves to nonviolent service, even total sacrifice, for others around them:

It is often mistakenly held that the key concept of Jesus’ ethic is the “Golden Rule”: “do to others as you would have them do to you.” This is stated by Jesus, however, not as the sum of his own teachings, but as the center of the law (Mark 12:28f; Matthew 22:40, citing Leviticus 19:15). But Jesus’ own “fulfillment” of this thrust of the law, which thereby becomes through his own work a “new commandment”… is different, “Do as I have done to you” or “do as the Father did in sending his son.”

This is the underpinning of Mennonite pacifism, and our understanding that Christians are called to service and peacemaking as much as to proselytizing.

The Gospel first

This perspective on Jesus is closely associated with – or even gives rise to – the way Mennonites view the Bible. Though we believe that it is sacred, and “God-breathed,” we also believe that the Bible is not a “flat” book, with every verse given equal theological weight. For Mennonites, the “weightiest” part of the biblical text is the Gospel message, centering on the teachings of Jesus, his death on the cross, and his resurrection. All other passages are interpreted in light of the Gospels’ text. So, rather than understanding Old Testament passages that seem to sanction war or slavery as evidence that God likes either of those things, we look through the Gospel lens and conclude that these are records of life before the example set by Jesus, not models for Christian behavior.

This perspective is actually very important to me, as a scientist. If the Bible is not one monolithic whole, but a collection of stories, I can understand, say, the Genesis creation narrative as a symbolic account of God’s relationship to the universe without necessarily having to treat the Gospel in exactly the same way.

Further reading

But don’t take my off-the-cuff theologizing as the last word; the website of Mennonite Church USA has user-friendly explanations of Mennonite thought and doctrine and links to denominational documents that go into way more detail than this.

In which I’m still not excommunicated

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So The Mennonite has published my letter about their painfully naive review of the anti-evolution movie Expelled. The version that made print has been pretty heavily edited (a whole paragraph on Darwin’s view of eugenics is gone), but the residue is more focused, and they retained my recommendation of Can a Darwinian be a Christian?, which I’d consider the most important point.

Not only has this not got me expelled (hah!) from Mennonite Church USA, it’s actually not the only Expelled-critical response they got. Arden Slotter wrote in to point out that Intelligent Design is an untestable hypothesis:

If a scientist states that his work in science leads him to conclude that there is no Intelligent Designer involved in the creation and operation of the universe, that conclusion is not scientifically based because no scientific test could show it to be false. If scientists who are Christian state that we are confident that God is the Intelligent Designer who created the universe as best we know in a way consistent with the explanations of biology, geology, astronomy and cosmology, then that is a statement of faith, not a scientific conclusion.

Well, put, Arden. It’s always good to know you’re not alone.

Reporting undercover from an evangelical spiritual retreat

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Via BoingBoing, where I seem to be spending a lot of time lately: Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi attends a spiritual retreat run by John Hagee‘s Texas megachurch and lives to tell the tale. Taibbi paints a picture of desperate, manipulable people who come to the retreat for spiritual direction, culminating in a frankly creepy exorcism of “demons” ranging from “lust” to “intellect.” And the picture that develops is not good: by the end of the retreat, the attendees accept anything their leaders might assert:

Once a preacher says it, it’s true. No one is going to look up anything the preacher says, cross-check his facts, raise an eyebrow at something that might sound a little off. Some weeks later, I would be at a Sunday service in which Pastor John Hagee himself would assert that the Bible predicts that Jesus Christ is going to return to Earth bearing a “rod of iron” to discipline the ACLU. It goes without saying that the ACLU was not mentioned in the passage in Ezekiel he was citing — but the audience ate it up anyway.

And I guess that’s where this gets scary; the “retreat,” though it strongly resembles a secular self-help workshop, turns into an indoctrination session.