Page 4465 – Christianity Today (2024)

It is the only serious sin left. Even murder has its mitigating factors, but not this one. It is the pariah sin, the charge that makes you untouchable without need for further explanation. The sin is intolerance, and the greatest sinners in late twentieth-century America are evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. America is sick of intolerant people, and it’s not going to tolerate them anymore.

How did orthodox Christianity, whose spread throughout the world was predicated in great part on its inclusiveness (“Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden”), come to be a symbol of exclusivity and intolerance? One possible answer echoes the sentiment seen on the church signboard: “If you feel distant from God, guess who moved?” It seems so simple. Christians have stayed true to a 4,000-year-old revelation of moral truth, ultimately rooted in God’s eternal nature. Naturally this of-fends the “do your own thing” sensibilities of talk-show hosts, Hollywood filmmakers, White House spin doctors, and those who follow after.

A less sanguine explanation is that tolerance was invented in response to the spectacle of Christians slaughtering each other in the name of Christ. The religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe led to the increasingly widespread conviction that there had to be a better way to decide these things than with the sword. The answer was tolerance, essentially a decision not to decide—that is, to decide on the private level but not on the public.

Historically, then, tolerance was the liberal, secular answer to the inability of conservative religionists to compromise with those who differed from them. Tolerance, in this sense, is relatively new, not something even thought desirable through most of human history.

After all, why tolerate error? This is precisely what tolerance requires of us. Genuine tolerance, as opposed to its pale counterfeits, requires us to allow those who espouse or live out ideas we think wrong, perhaps even harmful, not only to do so but also to try to persuade others to do the same. A number of important notions imbedded in this concept are often ignored when charges of intolerance are thrown around.

First, one is not tolerant of something unless one objects to it. I do not tolerate something I either accept or am indifferent to, because it requires nothing of me. Most social liberals, for instance, cannot rightfully be said to be tolerant regarding hom*osexual behavior since they have no objection to it. You do not have to tolerate that which you accept or affirm. If you want to know whether a liberal is tolerant, ask what he or she thinks of Jesse Helms or Pat Robertson or Kenneth Starr.

If tolerance requires an initial objection, then conservatives, ironically, may be much more tolerant than liberals, because there are so many more things to which they object. The least tolerant person is the person who accepts everything, because such a person is not required to overcome any internal objections. To paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, turnips are singularly tolerant.

A challenge for those who prize tolerance as one of the highest public goods is to distinguish between healthy tolerance and a diseased moral passivity or indifference. What is the difference between a genuinely tolerant society and a morally bankrupt one, incapable of calling evil for what it is? Is Chesterton on to something when he says tolerance is the virtue of those who don’t believe in anything? Too much of what passes as tolerance in America is not the result of principled judgment but is simple moral indifference. Invoking “it’s not my business” may keep us from becoming a nation of prudish snoops, but historically, it also has led nations into collaboration with great evil.

If tolerance requires an initial objection, it also implies withheld power. If I would stop something if I could, but am powerless to do so, I am not tolerant, merely impotent. True tolerance means I voluntarily withhold what power I have to coerce someone else’s behavior.

In an open society such as ours, where a wide range of divergent thinking and behavior is protected by law and custom, one must show varying degrees of tolerance even to that to which one objects. In opposing abortion, for instance, some seek legal sanctions, others rely on moral suasion or civil disobedience, and still others seek pragmatic compromise. A radical few murder abortion doctors. All but the last actually demonstrate tolerance, to differing degrees, in that they seek to persuade more than to coerce.

If tolerance requires an initial objection, then conservatives, ironically, may be much more tolerant than liberals.

This suggests an interesting paradox within the notion of tolerance. At the core of tolerance is a kind of intolerance. If you can only tolerate that to which you object, then you have already shown yourself somewhat intolerant in making that initial objection.

This hidden aspect of tolerance doesn’t bother those who think there’s plenty in the world to object to, but it is unsettling to the interminably open-minded. Their raison d’etre is captured succinctly in a dictum offered approvingly in my son’s high-school sociology text as it discusses hom*osexual practice: “everything is right somewhere and nothing is right everywhere.”

Thus relativism absolutizes pluralism. That is, it takes the clearly observable fact that we have a multitude of views and values and practices in the world—pluralism—and draws the illegitimate conclusion that there is no justifiable way of choosing among them. Truth is merely opinion, goodness only what the majority says it is.

Such relativism is not the province only of academic texts, it is the spirit of our age and therefore deep in our own bones. It is no surprise, then, that intolerance is our society’s greatest sin. The intolerant person is the one thing that cannot be tolerated, the one person who must be shamed or silenced. A guest commentator on National Public Radio shocked even his progressive hosts, but spoke for many, when he objected to the Southern Baptist belief that a lot of people are going to hell: “The evaporation of 4 million [people] who believe in this crap would leave the world a better place.” (It’s comforting to see that the dreaded Religious Right is not the only source of intolerance in our society.)

Nevertheless—and here’s the rub—it is widely acknowledged that no moral person tolerates everything. For some, the intolerable grows largely from issues of justice and fairness—racism, sexism, hom*ophobia, economic inequity. Such people are divided on an issue like p*rnography, where values that they hold with equal passion—freedom of expression versus ending the exploitation of women—collide. Given that everyone agrees that some things should not be tolerated, the real issue should not be whether one is tolerant or intolerant, but what’s included on one’s list.

The charge of intolerance has become a potent weapon in the culture wars, all the more useful because it carries a lot of emotional firepower without requiring a great deal of evidence or logical consistency. People complain about others “forcing their values” on them, when they are perfectly willing to do the same on many issues. Or they claim “you can’t legislate morality” when, in fact, the overwhelming majority of laws of all kinds are rooted in a moral assertion about how things ought to be. Doctor Laura, the popular yet controversial radio host, has remarked on the hate mail she receives for being so intolerant as to believe there is something like moral absolutes in the world: “The irony is that those people are mad because I made a judgment about somebody’s behavior, and, while they may admit that there is more than one possible opinion about the morality of any particular action in life, mine is obviously not one of them.”

Those accused of intolerance are usually thought to be guilty of one of two supporting sins—ignorance or callousness. A newspaper article praising a documentary on gay activism on college campuses notes that some might fault the film for not interviewing anyone who sees the hom*osexual lifestyle as “sinful,” but then concludes, “Anyone who tried to make that argument after the poignant stories of Gary and others would look stupid or heartless or both.” Stupid or heartless—not much of a choice, but the only one afforded those out of step with the moral climate of our times.

It is no surprise that religion is often seen as the greatest source of intolerance—as when, for example, not only gay activists but also many editorialists blamed conservative Christians for the brutal beating and death of Matthew Shepard. For the last 250 years or so, secularists have waited patiently for the fulfillment of their prediction that religion would die out in the next generation or two. But religious people have been singularly uncooperative, and new strategies have developed for controlling this blight on human progress. If religion won’t “wither away” as philosopher Richard Rorty has wished, then perhaps it can be privatized and thereby removed from influence on public life—sort of like localizing an outbreak of the plague.

Such a view is expressed by another academic: “Hope [for tolerance] may lie … in modernity itself and in its principal creation, international commercial society. It is still possible that the structures of this international order will encourage skepticism about religious and other claims to exclusivity and about the motives of those who impose such claims.” That’s an intriguing idea—if people cannot be argued out of their superstitions (rationalism), or coerced (totalitarianism), then perhaps they can be advertised into submission (materialism). If Darwin and Stalin didn’t get you, MasterCard will.

It is actually much easier to be considered intolerant today than in the past. You used to have to breathe a little smoke and fire, maybe vote to keep someone out of your country club, or at least tell inappropriate jokes. The bar has been lowered. Now all you have to do is disagree with someone, especially on certain hot-button issues.

Consider the following story. A priest, a rabbi, and an evangelical English teacher (myself) are on a plane heading to Washington, D.C. The priest and the rabbi together organize an annual trip to the Holocaust Museum in order to promote understanding, reconciliation, and, yes, tolerance. They invite people who they believe are in a position to influence others—one year pastors and religious leaders, another year teachers. The group is given material in advance, including, from the priest, a piece attacking the pope for not being progressive enough.

I have been to the Holocaust Museum before, but I still find it overwhelmingly powerful. There is little I wouldn’t do to stand against anything like the attitudes that made it possible, as I hope is clear in my teaching of literature and in my life. But there is one thing I won’t do, and that apparently is enough to make me intolerant, though nobody uses the word.

I won’t become a relativist, or even a universalist. I will not agree, as we were encouraged to agree at the posttrip debriefing, that all major religions are equally valid approaches to God, equally approved by God, and that to think otherwise is to be on the side at least of intolerance, if not of the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Now, that’s not really a fair assessment of what was said in the meeting. It was much more cordial, much more affirming, much more good-spirited than that. But it was in the air. It didn’t have to be said explicitly, because it was assumed, the common wisdom.

I was asked, spontaneously, to give my response to the trip at that debriefing. I tried to be cooperative, in keeping with the spirit of the two men who were expending a great amount of time and energy and resources to do a genuinely good and helpful thing. But I also said that I hoped my unwillingness to be a universalist did not disqualify me from being part of the dialogue. I was willing to respect most anyone seeking truth in life, but I wasn’t willing to agree that every search was equally successful, or that sincerity and being a “good person” were the defining marks of a successful quest.

The priest got up and said, of course no one was advocating relativism. The rabbi spoke to me afterward and said that he, for one, wanted me to be a part of any continuing dialogue. We have since exchanged letters. He still doesn’t see why if he can affirm my being a Christian who has a right relationship with God through Christ, I can’t affirm his having a right relationship with God without Christ. Or, though he doesn’t say it, affirm the Buddhists for having their own adequate truth without either God or Christ.

I try to say to him that he is not really being as flexible as he claims, because he is insisting that only his view on this is correct. I must give up my “triumphalism” (another version of the intolerance charge) and Christian exclusivity, but he apparently has to give up nothing. I become tolerant only by adopting his and the priest’s position. He responds that he really is not interested in tolerance; he expects affirmation. Why should his religion, older than mine, be merely tolerated? How condescending of me to offer tolerance, as though he and his religion were something to be put up with.

I reply that I wasn’t the one to bring up tolerance in the first place. I agree that tolerance is a fairly weak concept and not an adequate goal for how people should relate to one another. I want to say that he and the priest are really coreligionists. Their religion is ethical humanism—the human quest for being good through human efforts—with a side dish of theism. Their liberal Catholicism and liberal Judaism are not really two different religions getting along with each other, but only different flavors of the same religion. They are much closer to each other in core beliefs than they are to more conservative believers within the religion each espouses. They, in fact, do not really respect other religions so much as they try to shame members of other religions to give up their “absolutism” to join them in the progressive club of the open-minded. And they are as absolute in this requirement as any absolutist fundamentalist of any religion.

I don’t say this to the rabbi, however. It is undoubtedly a caricature of his position, it would be hurtful to him, and no one would be the better for me having sounded off. And I have no confidence he would understand, much less be persuaded, even if I were a model of discretion, sensitivity, and logical clarity. Some views of the world operate like parallel universes, neither capable of interacting with the other, and nary a wormhole in sight. Perhaps the progressive will always see the traditionalist as fearfully clinging to past, constricted, and culturally bound notions of morality. And traditionalists will always see progressives as trendy, na•ve, and confused.

Our debriefing of the trip to the Holocaust Museum ends with the priest issuing a dark warning that a Jews for Jesus gathering is coming to town the next week, suggesting that they represent the kind of threat we are all fighting against. I decide not to mention that I have given money to Jews for Jesus for years.

I began giving in the mid-1970s after I met Rivkah, a converted Jew I taught with for a year at a fundamentalist college. She was quitting teaching to join Jews for Jesus and trying to raise support. I liked Rivkah, and I wanted to help her out.

I didn’t realize how controversial the organization was until many years later when I was talking to the woman who speaks to my classes when I teach the Holocaust. She is a survivor of five concentration camps, and I respect her enormously for her efforts to let young people see and hear from her what they may pass over or not believe in books. Mrs. W. once mentioned to me that one of her friend’s children had joined Jews for Jesus, “a terrible organization.” It startled me. It occurred to me that Jews for Jesus was to a Jewish parent what the Moonies would be to an evangelical Christian parent—only worse, because Christians, for all their sense of being under attack, are still far too numerous to be in any danger of disappearing, a situation not felt by many Jews.

Christians are seen as the pit bulls of culture wars—small brains, big teeth, strong jaws, and no interest in compromise. Is this indictment fair?

So what am I to think of Jews for Jesus? Do I think of Rivkah or Mrs. W.? Do I listen to the priest or to the Great Commission? Is that commission to go into all the world and preach the gospel and make disciples misunderstood, as some argue, or simply baldly imperialistic and triumphalist as others claim? Is it intolerant even to offer the gospel, without bribe or coercion? Can this story only be told to those who already embrace it? Should no one try to convince anyone to be and believe anything but what he or she was born into? Are feminists and environmentalists equally wrong to evangelize? Is not spreading to others the truth as one sees it a sign of respect and sensitivity, or is it a sign of indifference and confusion? If I have a life-saving medicine and don’t share it, I am selfish and properly condemned. What am I to do if I believe I have a life-saving message?

What, in short, are theologically conservative Christians to make of all this? Should it bother us to be called intolerant? How far do we go in resisting what we believe to be wrong? (Do we, for instance, call for sodomy laws and the jailing of practicing gays? Or do we support fairness in housing and employment rights for gays but not the legalization of hom*osexual marriage? Or something else?)

I would like to think that the charge of intolerance is entirely wrongheaded, a badge to be worn proudly by a people committed to goodness and truth no matter what the cost. The problem is, I hang around Christians too much. I hear too many sermons, too many Christian gurus on the radio and television; I get too much Christian junk mail from too many Christian organizations. It is difficult to argue with a straight face that Christians are unfairly accused of intolerance when one is surrounded by name calling, finger pointing, back stabbing, bomb throwing, and plain, old-fashioned gossip. And that’s just the stuff Christians do to each other.

It is an admirable thing when one is willing to die for the truth. It is more problematic when one is willing to kill for it. Throughout this century, the church has shown itself more willing to do the latter than the former. A long documentation of fundamentalist and evangelical warring against those within the ranks is both depressing and unnecessary. Anyone raised in this subculture knows the stories, and many bear the wounds.

Another problem with easily shrugging off the charge of intolerance is the selective nature of our moral outrage. We appear to be in a continual lather over things sexual—p*rnography, hom*osexuality, abortion, prostitution, adultery, sex education, promiscuity, and fornication —yet we have been amazingly patient, even lethargic, about the evils of racism, and positively resistant to righting the wrongs of sexism. The recent counterattack in the “values” sector of the culture wars, in fact, has the liberals shouting that they are really the moral ones because they are fighting hunger, injustice, and the like, while conservatives are just interested in getting their long, blue noses into people’s bedrooms.

Should it bother us to be called intolerant? Is God tolerant?

It’s no wonder, then, that our reputation in dealing with those with whom we disagree is somewhere to the right of Rasputin. We are seen as the pit bulls of the culture wars—small brains, big teeth, strong jaws, and no interest in compromise. Is this indictment fair? Often not. Understandable? Absolutely.

What is a Christian to do? Well, traditionally we have tried, when confronted with a problem, to figure out what the Bible says. It’s too much to consider here what the Bible has to say about the individual issues of the culture wars; many voices are being heard on those issues. But what, if anything, does the Bible have to say about tolerance in general? Is God tolerant? Does the Bible say we should be?

My answer is tentative and anecdotal—and maybe a bit wishy-washy for some. Is God tolerant? Yes and no. The Bible certainly teaches us that God hates sin. That much, I think, is clear. He is depicted as morally uncompromising, righteously angry, holy, and sure to punish evil. Yet he is also depicted as patient, long-suffering, forgiving, and slow to anger—qualities closely related to tolerance. It seems he does, in a sense, tolerate sin—at least for a season. If tolerance is withholding the power to coerce conformity with one’s own views, then it seems God is exceptionally tolerant. After all, we do much that displeases him, that violates who he is and what he made creation to be, and yet he does not immediately destroy us or even force us into obedience.

A number of stories from the Bible touch on the issue of tolerance. When David flees Jerusalem under threat from Absalom, Shimei comes out to curse and stone him as he passes by. David restrains those who want to kill Shimei, saying Shimei is perhaps speaking for the Lord. That is an interesting example of tolerance (though undercut by David’s deathbed petition to Solomon to take revenge on Shimei). Is it remotely possible that some of the stones that get tossed at Christians for their attitudes and behavior are deserved—even from God? It would not be the first time God used strange messengers.

Surely there are also lessons about tolerance and intolerance in the parable of the Good Samaritan. It may not be precisely intolerance that keeps the priest and Levite from helping the wounded man, but it is close enough to be instructive. Clearly they feel sufficiently removed from him to feel no responsibility to help. Their religiosity does not translate into neighborliness, into godly behavior.

Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan in order to explain the meaning of the command to “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Since Christians in our society are essentially accused of being bad neighbors, we should ask ourselves what it means to be a good neighbor today. It is more than Mister Rogers niceness, certainly, but also more than pointing out our neighbor’s mistakes.

Perhaps the single most enlightening story for thinking about God’s attitude toward tolerance is the gospel story of the woman caught in adultery. We have in this ancient text all the elements of a contemporary “values clarification” exercise on tolerance: a woman accused of a sexual sin (her cosinner nowhere to be seen), religious leaders insisting on strict application of the traditional moral law, and a crowd representing society as a whole. But instead of all this being mediated by Jenny or Jerry, we have Jesus.

Ultimately tolerance is too weak a concept to be attributed to God.

The religious leaders care less about the moral law, of course, than they do about defeating an enemy. (Sound familiar?) They have brought this woman to Jesus to trap him. Either he will deny the law of Moses and thereby lose his authority as a moral teacher, or he will agree to the condemnation of the woman and thereby lose the sympathy of the common people who chafe under the arrogant legalism of the religious leaders (and also perhaps get himself in trouble with the Roman authorities who alone can approve the death penalty).

What would today’s apostles of tolerance do? They would point out, to begin with, that the woman and presumably her sexual partner are consenting adults. Who is to say that adultery is a sin? Whose business is it anyway? Perhaps it’s of interest to offended spouses, but certainly not anyone else. The woman should be freed without blame, perhaps even commended for her bold defiance of archaic and sexist sexual norms, and directed to the nearest lawyer to discuss the merits of a lawsuit against her accusers.

What might today’s public defenders of morality do? About what the religious authorities of her day did. They would use her as a public example of sin, show little or no regard for her as a person, call for her public shaming, and exploit the whole situation to advance their call for a return to traditional morality. She would be the poster girl for their next fundraising letter decrying the decline of religious values and calling for sacrificial financial support in order to carry on God’s fight against evil.

What does Jesus do? He does the seemingly impossible, affirming the moral law and at the same time refusing to humiliate the sinner. He tells the religious leaders that the one of them who is without sin should cast the first stone. (In the background, a cheer from the lovers of tolerance.) He tells the woman that he does not condemn her. (Two cheers.) But then, crucially, he says what no modern champion of tolerance is likely to say: “Go and sin no more.” (A disappointed groan.)

Is God tolerant? Yes, more so than we are. But also less so. God’s forbearance never compromises his holiness or justice. He forgives and waits where we attack and destroy. He grieves and judges where we are lax or indifferent. Our goal is to be as tolerant as God but not more so, praying earnestly for the wisdom to know the difference.

Ultimately, tolerance is too weak a concept to be attributed to God. God is so much more than tolerant that Christians can rightfully ignore tolerance as a fundamental goal for their own lives—but only if they are willing to live by a much higher standard. God does not call us to be tolerant of our neighbors. God calls us to love them—at least as much as we love ourselves. Before we all nod our approval, we should take a sober look at what that might entail.

Biblical love is always sacrificial love. Don’t say you love someone unless you are willing to suffer for that person. Sacrificial love does not say, “Do as I do or you are going to hell.” It says, “I would rather be crucified than have you be harmed.”

This is the point at which the “hate the sin, love the sinner” maxim is most relevant, but also most questionable. We say this as glibly as the tolerance people mouth their slogans. It is perfectly correct, and also perfectly unconvincing.

If you are loved, you generally know it. And you know it in great part by how someone acts toward you. The simple fact is that the people whose behavior we believe is sinful do not report that they feel loved—or anything close to it. They do not feel as the woman caught in adultery or the Samaritan woman most likely felt when confronted with their sin by Jesus.

“Who cares how they feel?” some will say. “The replacement of objective moral law by subjective feelings is how we got into this mess in the first place.” But the assertion of the objective moral law without concern for how it is experienced is legalism, and legalism is the counterfeit of love-based Christian morality.

Evidence for the lack of love in Christian rhetoric is not hard to find and is not limited to the extremes. All I have to do to find it is open my mail. The sad truth is that, in our battle with a hostile culture, we have adopted the culture’s tactics. We fight ugliness with ugliness, distortion with distortion, sarcasm with sarcasm.

Consider the ACLU, an organization as self-declaredly opposed to the social agenda of conservative Christianity as any. The tone of their fundraising letters, like most, is consistently alarmist, simplistic, and sarcastic: “Freedom vs. authoritarianism. That’s what the struggle over competing visions of morality is all about.” “Increasingly we are being assaulted with the belief that somehow we are a nation in steep moral decline.” “We are being told by the Merchants of Virtue … that we should return to those good old days.” “Right now those who would impose their pious standards of morality on private, personal behavior are dangerously close to winning the debate.” It’s not exactly an appeal to sweet reason.

Surely Christians are different. Surely Christians speak to the sinner with a broken heart. Surely they try to model the spirit of Christ: “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.” In many places, perhaps, but not in my mailbox, not on my radio. Consider the following excerpts from a fundraising letter, typical of those from many highly successful Christian organizations: “These shameful ‘high priests’ of the anti-virtue movement.” “As God’s people for this historic hour, we rise to the challenge and give whatever it takes to turn back the anti-Christian juggernaut which threatens our way of life.” “Do not doubt that prayer will become a crime, the Bible off-limits, and sharing our faith in public forbidden.” Who can resist reaching for the checkbook when the whole cosmos is at stake?

But such tactics undermine the Christian witness that the senders seek to proclaim. The letter from which I’ve quoted displays all the familiar manipulative strategies of modern advertising and political propaganda. The envelope even gives the false impression that it is a registered letter, a touch worthy of magazine subscription marketers and vacation scams. Winning is losing if this is how we are to win the culture wars.

I believe we do this because we do not really trust the gospel. Turn the other cheek, the first shall be last, lose our life to gain it, love our enemies. Those bold principles of Jesus make for great sermons, but in our bones we appear not to believe they are practical for everyday living in a hostile society. We seem to believe that if we are not as aggressive and hard-nosed as our supposed enemies, that God (and our organization) will somehow be defeated and goodness will disappear from the earth. The result is that we are perceived, often not unfairly, as simply mean-spirited—as, well, intolerant.

How should it be? How can we affirm Christian morality, unapologetically rooted in the Bible, without becoming rhetorical bomb throwers?

First, we should resist any appeal whose primary aim or result is to make us either angry or afraid. Anger and fear are our most primitive and instinctive emotions, and they are the surest route (along with sentimentality) to our checkbooks. Neither leads us to love our neighbor, or God either, for that matter. We are eager to cite Jesus’ righteous anger in cleansing the temple, but the combination of righteousness and anger is much more problematic in us than it is in him. We would do well to tape a verse from James on our foreheads: “Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry. For human anger does not result in God’s righteousness” (1:19-20).

Second, we should listen to the stories of those who oppose us. Everyone has a story to tell, and the surest route to conflict is to supress the stories of others. A source of frustration for conservative Christians is the feeling that their story is being silenced in the public square. If we want the right to tell our story, however, we must be willing, even eager, to hear the stories of others. And we should listen compassionately, with a bias toward finding common ground rather than listening for an opportunity to attack. This common ground is not the flaccid “everybody is right” of flabby relativism. The goal is not niceness, or pseudounanimity, but a core package of values and rights we can affirm together while we continue to disagree on some fundamental understandings of the ultimate nature of things.

Must Christians be tolerant? Not really—certainly not as our society defines the term. But we must be loving, and that is a far greater challenge, with far greater dangers and rewards. We must find better ways to demonstrate that we do, in fact, love the sinner while we hate the sin.

Our response to abortion is instructive. In the years immediately after its legalization, Christian opponents of abortion were widely accused of caring about the fetus but not about the woman or even the child if it was born. It was easier to say abortion is a sin than to provide practical help to sinners. Since that time, countless programs, many of them volunteer, have arisen that minister to every need, physical and spiritual, of pregnant women in difficult circ*mstances. Tangible love has replaced empty denunciation.

We have failed so far to respond as well to hom*osexuals. We have not been in the frontlines in the fight against AIDS, just as we were not in the struggle against racism. How differently would conservative Christianity be perceived today if we had been the first and most passionate of those offering practical help to AIDS sufferers? The bulk of our response—verbal and nonverbal, literal and symbolic—suggests that we hate the sinner every bit as much as the sin. This is the story we hear from gays in our pews as much as from those in the parades. We can say it isn’t so; but talk is cheap. We do not have to affirm hom*osexuals in their hom*osexuality, as our culture insists, but we do have to love them, and we haven’t yet figured out how to do that.

We have always struggled as human beings to understand and live out the implications of the “thou shalt nots” and the “blessed ares” of the Bible. It is clear that there are things we ought and ought not to do. And there is no reason to apologize for asserting that to a tone-deaf world. But it is also clear that the bedrock of all biblical morality is God’s love. That love is not incompatible with judgment (“go and sin no more”) but it is incompatible with our not properly valuing all that God has created, including those who offend us.

Daniel Taylor is a professor of literature at Bethel College in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

A year from now, on January 1, 2000, Thomas L. Clark plans to be somewhere other than in his Chicago home. A member of the Forest Preserve Bible Church, Clark is stocking up on food, has a hand mill for grinding grain into flour, and will decamp to the wilderness in advance of the first day of next year. That is when he, and many other Christians, believe a computer bug will trigger a major breakdown of our societal infrastructure.

Clark says he wants to be ready because he believes God does not want believers to commit “intentional suicide” should the worst occur. “I don’t want to have my assets where they’re unsheltered. I don’t want to have 10 million people marauding through the city looking for food and angry because the government has deceived them.”

About the potential computer crisis, Clark warns, “Every day I study to see if there’s anything sufficient being done, and I’ve found nothing to convince me that we won’t have one massive problem. This is going to rearrange my whole life.”

It already has. Clark, a self-described “informed fundamentalist,” runs a business called Y2K Prepare, and from its Internet Web site he sells food mills and offers tips on how to store food and water before the possible calamity. Sales are steady, he reports, and “there may be too great a demand to meet it all” by the end of the year. He claims one raw-grain firm is back ordered eight months on some products. On another Internet site, those convinced of a coming calamity can even buy a $7,000 survival dome.

Clark says online articles by Canadian computer consultant Peter de Jaeger and a Web site created by Reconstructionist Gary North have convinced him that a silver bullet will not arrive to solve the problem. “Everybody thinks they are going to fix it,” Clark says. “But who are they?”

A GROWING TREND:

Clark is far from alone in his concerns over the Year 2000, or Y2K, “bug.” Christians who once avoided computer technology are suddenly poring over information related to predictions of a global crisis as the next millennium approaches.

The worry about Y2K stems from the potential for desktop and mainframe computers to misread an abbreviated date such as 01/01/00 as taking place in the year 1900 and not the year 2000. When errors occur, programs could shut down systems or yield incorrect results. Already some computers have invited centenarians to be registered for kindergarten or assigned aged hospital patients to the pediatric ward.

While those incidents might be humorous inconveniences, the prospect of greater disaster is what worries people. At risk are computer-operated systems for electrical generation and distribution, water treatment, air traffic control, and other vital services. Should these computers malfunction and the disruption last for more than a few days, it could lead to massive economic breakdown.

Even Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft’s chief technical officer, said in Fortune magazine that one cannot dismiss the doomsday forecasts: “It’s very hard to tell how bad the situation will be. I’m sure things will break. It’s very hard to dispel a nightmare scenario. … The dark-side scenario of airplanes falling out of the sky and bank computers crashing is possible. But it’s fundamentally very, very hard to know whether the impact will be big or little.”

Though the looming problem has a secular origin, Christians have recast it in religious terms. Christian books, videos, and Web sites discussing the phenomenon are springing up like kudzu.

For instance, last spring Regnery Gateway published the best-selling nonfiction book The Millenium Bug, by Thomas Nelson vice president Michael S. Hyatt; and in the fall, Nelson’s Word Publishing division brought out Hyatt’s novel, Y2K: The Day the World Shut Down.

“We’ve got a digital hurricane coming that’s got the potential for simultaneous, multiple disruptions,” warns Hyatt. “While I am stubbornly optimistic that it will be between a brownout and a blackout, I am more pessimistic today than I was. That this hasn’t been raised to a national emergency is amazing.”

Year 2000 videos from televangelists Jack Van Impe and Jerry Falwell are hot sellers. The Christian Broadcasting Network’s (CBN) Y2K Web site is receiving 80,000 hits a month.

Unlike in recent years, when forecasters such as Bible scholar Edgar C. Whisenant (CT, Oct. 21, 1988, p. 43) and Family Radio cofounder Harold Camping (CT, Oct. 24, 1994, p. 84) stirred many by predicting the date of Christ’s return, the latest round of prognostications does not hang on Bible prophecies. Both Whisenant and Camping used Scriptures to argue their date setting, as had New York farmer and Baptist preacher William Miller, who heralded a return of Christ in 1844.

Yet secular Y2K speculation has been grafted onto escalating end-times talk in Christian circles as the third millennium approaches. Although the best-selling “Left Behind” four-part series written by Timothy LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins and published by Tyndale House makes no specific references to the year 2000, such apocalyptic fiction has whetted an appetite. Three million copies of the books in the series have been sold, making it the most successful Christian fiction sequence in history.

PRELUDE TO PANIC?

While the question of whether technical catastrophes will come as the year 2000 dawns is the focal point for speculation, prophetic references often accompany the rhetoric in Christian circles. For example, Falwell, in an August sermon broadcast on his Old Time Gospel Hour from Lynchburg, Virginia, predicted God’s wrath on January 1, 2000. “He may be preparing to confound our language, to jam our communications, scatter our efforts, and judge us for our sin and rebellion against his lordship,” Falwell preached. “We are hearing from many sources that January 1, 2000, will be a fateful day in the history of the world.”

Others are not waiting. Following a failed October 10 prediction of an earthquake that would destroy Denver, a group of 75 adults and children called Concerned Christians and led by Monte Kim Miller disappeared, surfacing more than a month later in Israel to await millennial developments.

Another 100 Americans, none related to Miller’s camp, have moved to Jerusalem to await the end of the millennium, anticipating a cataclysm at the end of 1999, according to Brenda E. Brasher, assistant professor of religion at Mount Union College in Alliance, Ohio. More are likely to follow. “The number of millennial forces at work in our society now are such that it would be surprising if we did not see a certain number of these incidents,” she says. The Israeli government has committed $12 million to upgrade security at the Temple Mount, fearing extremists might undertake suicidal attacks in Jerusalem as a way to bring about the fulfillment of end-times prophecy.

Brasher is surveying evangelical churches and discovering a different emphasis: “I am finding an increase in millennial rhetoric with a kind of intensity to it, and a lot of fear associated with it,” she says. “I’m also finding some level heads in those congregations that are trying to balance out or cancel that kind of fear.

“There’s an escalating amount of millennial tensions,” Brasher says. “Y2K is a lightning rod that’s drawing some of this millennial fear. It’s an emergent problem where some of this millennial fear can coalesce.”

DISMISSING DOOMSDAY:

Some critics, however, are less sanguine about the arrival of a doomsday that would coincide with the turn of a millennium. Indiana State University professor Richard V. Pierard, an evangelical, says, “I see this as just a bunch of nonsense and hysteria to sell books, get money, and alarm people.” Pierard, coauthor of the forthcoming The New Millennium Manual: A Once and Future Guide (Baker Book House), blames the explosion of Christian television and the Internet with fueling the Y2K situation. He warns that even if “university studies” and other “expert” opinions are attached to Y2K prophecies, Christians need to exercise caution regarding the more dire warnings.

“I don’t see how evangelicalism can benefit in any way from this,” Pierard says. “It simply holds them up to ridicule.”

William R. Garrett, professor of sociology at Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont, notes: “We may have passed the year 2000 two years ago [referring to the common scholarly opinion that Jesus was born in 4 B.C.]. Given that problem, I would say this is an excuse, an opportunity for a lot of folks to say things they want to say.”

HIGHER FEDERAL PROFILE:

While there were concerns about the Y2K issue raised as far back as four years ago, the public profile of the millennium bug has risen much higher during the past 12 months. Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah) chairs a Senate subcommittee on Y2K preparedness and has held numerous hearings on the issue, with one in June raising concerns that the electric utility industry—which Hyatt calls the linchpin of any potential crisis—may not be fully protected against shutdowns.

The U.S. General Services Administration offers periodic report cards on the progress agencies are making in resolving Y2K problems. At last count, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Federal Aviation Administration still had miles to go in solving potential problems.

The prospect for mayhem is concerning Christian relief officials. According to Maj. David Dalberg, disaster services coordinator for the Salvation Army’s Alexandria, Virginia, national headquarters, emergency responders are beginning to coordinate efforts in anticipation of the worst.

“A doomsday perspective does create major concerns for us,” Dalberg says. “It’s one thing to have a disaster, but how do you get out of it? With a flood, there’s a recovery plan. But if we can’t figure out a recovery plan with this much notice, how can we do it after the fact?”

What concerns Dalberg and other relief officials is the chance for multiple breakdowns within a short span. American Red Cross and Salvation Army units are frequent responders to natural disasters, but a series of disasters in a short period would be overwhelming.

MINISTRIES RESPOND:

Some Christian ministries have studied the Y2K issue and developed a thoughtful response. For instance, a recent three-day Focus on the Family radio series on the problem drew a heavy response. “There is a middle ground between panicking and doing nothing, and that’s what we’re trying to find,” host James Dobson said at the conclusion of the broadcasts.

Insight for Living, Charles Swindoll’s radio ministry, has questioned vendors as to whether they are working to solve Y2K technological difficulties. Those who are dismissing the Y2K problem have been told they will not have further business.

Shaunti Feldhahn, author of the just released Y2K: The Millennium Bug—A Balanced Christian Response (Multnomah), has started a ministry in Woodstock, Georgia, called the Joseph Project 2000. The organization aids local congregations, from working with utilities to check Y2K compliance to digging a well in case emergency water is needed.

Concerns over safety and travel caused InterVarsity Christian Fellowship to delay its triennial Urbana (Ill.) Missions Conference a year. The convention had been scheduled for December 27-31, 1999, but it will now be held on those dates in 2000.

Even those groups planning to emphasize evangelistic activity in 2000 are doing so with an eye on the potential crisis. Cornell Haan, national facilitator of ministry networks for Mission America, notes that a December summit hosted by the Minneapolis-based organization brought together experts in technology, evangelism, and human services to plan for disaster relief and outreach. “Some people are saying this could be the greatest evangelistic opportunity we have seen,” Haan says.

National leaders who have issued repeated Y2K alerts include CBN founder Pat Robertson and Thomas Road Baptist Church pastor Falwell. Along with Falwell’s television program, his monthly National Liberty Journal newspaper publishes Y2K alerts, and a church Web site is selling a three-part sermon on video for $28.

Falwell told CT, “I plan to certainly prepare my family as I would for a forecasted natural disaster; that is, water and canned goods, perhaps a generator—the simple things that most prudent people are doing.”

CONGREGATIONS PREPARE:

A few smaller churches are feeling greater pressure because of the Year 2000 issue.

Tim Chambers, pastor of Christ Church, a 250-member congregation that is part of the New Frontiers Family of Churches in Joplin, Missouri, says the issue has heightened concerns among his members.

“There are some people who are making preparations for the end of the world, as we know it—or at least a long interruption,” Chambers says. “It has the potential to be divisive, and, initially, there have been relationships that were put under some measure of strain.”

Allowing congregants to express concerns has been important for Mitch Dennis, pastor of the Ely Gospel Tabernacle, a part of the Fellowship of Christian Assemblies in Ely, Minnesota. The congregation has a committee dealing with various potential Year 2000 problems.

“We need to allow people to vent their opinions and address those issues as a body, then allow them to solve a lot of those problems,” Dennis says. “It’s just a matter of management and allowing people to express their excitement, but not letting them go wild.”

In October, more than 320 participants from churches in 30 states met at CBN’s conference center in Virginia Beach to discuss Y2K preparations. While CBN’s Pat Robertson stressed a Y2K crisis as a time of ministry opportunity for Christians, some attendees were more concerned about individual needs.

Carol Burton, a “Y2K task force coordinator” at the Rock Church in Sarasota, Florida, related how her church had been actively preparing for Y2K through information sessions. Members from her church are planning a citywide outreach and will sponsor a booth at a local mall, showing a Y2K video, offering literature, and answering questions.

Michael Moore, cofounder of the Church at Memphis Networking Connection, expressed deep concern about his community’s readiness. His church hosted a three-day Y2K conference in October and plans a citywide meeting in January to which federal representatives have been invited. The church has started preparation classes with its best successes to date being first aid and cardiopulmonary resuscitation classes taught by registered nurses from the congregation.

A common theme among those studying the Y2K issue is surprise that others are not as worked up about it as they are. Hyatt believes Christians need to prepare to help those who “cannot or will not prepare.”

DENOMINATIONS SKEPTICAL:

As concern about the possible effects of Y2K disruption grows, denominations are beginning to consider its effects on members. In October, the General Council of the Springfield, Missouri-based Assemblies of God (AG) cautioned members in a written statement: “Needless fear and alarmist tactics over the Y2K issue and the approaching turn of the millennium are directly in conflict with the teaching of our Lord.”

The AG admonished members not to adopt a secular approach to Y2K. “We encourage our people to not engage in activities such as hoarding food, withdrawing money from banks, believing doomsday scenarios, or expecting the economic, political, and social collapse of Western civilization when the clock strikes January 1, 2000,” the denomination stated.

The AG urged Christians to focus on sharing their faith with those who are uncertain about the future. “We have the message of hope from our Lord who has taught us to Fear not,” the general council said. “Rather than fearing the collapse of computers or society, the Scriptures call upon us to fear God’s wrath. The good news is that God’s wrath needs never be experienced when we place our trust in Jesus as Savior and Lord.”

Paul McCain, assistant to the president of the St. Louis-based Lutheran Church- Missouri Synod, says the denomination is focusing more on outreach than stockpiling. “We’re a bit skeptical when we see these dire predictions coming from groups who always make these dire predictions,” McCain says. “We don’t feel as churchmen that it’s our role to get involved in this. We’re going to keep on doing what we’ve been doing, which is preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Evangelical Lutheran Church in America bishops in December issued a pastoral letter warning people to dismiss “wild prophecies” about the end of the world. Presiding Bishop H. George Anderson urged calm to counter speculation and fear that have no biblical basis. “We expect more craziness as we get closer to the event,” Anderson said.

CAUTION AND OPPORTUNITY:

These denominations are not alone in minimizing their concerns about the Y2K issue and any link to millennial prophecy. According to University of Wisconsin- Madison professor Paul Boyer, “Bible prophecy popularizers are taking advantage of the current cultural interest in the year 2000 to spread their very traditional message, which is not tied to any specific date on our human calendar.”

Boyer, whose 1992 book When Time Shall Be No More (Harvard University Press) chronicled the rise of dispensationalism among American evangelicals and in the culture at large, says the current warnings about an apocalypse beginning on 01/01/00 have a familiar ring.

That the tribulation could begin with a Y2K collapse “fits very closely into what the popularizers have been saying for years: the increasing reliance of society on technology and global electronic transfers of capital and information are paving the way for the Antichrist’s global control,” Boyer says. “Insofar as the Y2K phenomenon is focused on the reliance of modern society on technology, it reinforces that particular strand of interpretation.

“We’ve got a long history of people who are willing to believe this,” Boyer says. “The stuff sounds good and has the element of sensationalism. They seem like they have the inside track on what’s going on.”

Such skepticism does not deter people such as Hyatt from sounding an alarm over the potential crisis. While he believes those who hope for mass disruption “have flipped over the edge,” Hyatt also sees this as a tremendous opportunity for ministry. “In the providence of God, Y2K may enable us to discover our dependence upon him,” Hyatt says.

Religion professor Brasher says Y2K concerns sweeping through Christian circles offer a unique opportunity to leaders in those congregations. “It will be a challenge for mature Christians to be pastoral, to function as elders within their communities through the next couple of years,” she says. “We can anticipate that millennial fever will go up.”

Jim Jacobson, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Christian Freedom International, offers a broader context for weighing the importance of Y2K. He notes that Christians are hoarding for a hypothetical disaster while many Third World Christians not only have no electricity or running water but are in danger of being tortured, enslaved, or murdered.

In Ely, Minnesota, Mitch Dennis is keeping his focus on eternity: “I’m trying to temper the emotion, calm the fears, and place my trust in the sovereign work of God,” he says. “If it is the end times, we need to welcome him in that. We’ve got to focus on all eternity and trust God that he has a great plan for all of us.”

With additional reporting by D. L. Moore in Virginia Beach.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

While no one can predict what will take place when the calendar rolls over to the next century, it seems increasingly possible that anything from the videocassette recorder in the den to warning systems protecting the United States from nuclear missiles could go awry.

Between those extremes is the need for churches and individuals to prepare. Michael S. Hyatt, author of The Millennium Bug (Regnery Gateway, 1998) and Y2K: The Day the World Shut Down (Word, 1998), says Christians “need to take the initiative and become proactive. If all this fails, it becomes very much a consumer problem.” He suggests lobbying utilities and government agencies to demand Y2K compliance early and to prepare for problems if such compliance is not achieved.

Hyatt recommends that individuals assess their homes, businesses, and churches in terms of Y2K vulnerability. This includes a canvass of essential systems (electrical, water pumping, heating/cooling, security) to see if any of the controls of these systems might be affected by Y2K issues. In businesses and churches, Hyatt says it is important to obtain written certification that banks and other suppliers have Y2K-compliant systems in place in case liability from failed systems or services becomes an issue later.

Checking embedded systems—the chips that run everything from microwaves to elevators—can be more difficult. In terms of critical systems, it is worth checking with the supplier or manufacturer to receive written confirmation of Y2K compliance. If systems can be fixed to handle Year 2000 issues, repairs should be scheduled as early as possible. December promises to be a busy repair month.

While survivalists and those of a more pessimistic bent are focusing on amassing vast quantities of food and other goods, it will be prudent to have at least a small supply on hand in case of an initial disruption in food supplies. Emergency generators cost under $400 and could provide enough energy to keep a refrigerator, freezer, and small appliances going.

Editor’s note: Kellner (Kellner2000.com) has authored the book Y2K: Apocalypse or Opportunity.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

My brother, who attended a Bible college during a very smart-alecky phase in his life, enjoyed shocking groups of believers by sharing his “life verse.” After listening to others quote pious phrases from Proverbs, Romans, or Ephesians, he would stand and with a perfectly straight face recite very rapidly this verse from 1 Chronicles 26:18: “At Parbar westward, four at the causeway, and two at Parbar.”

Other students would screw up their faces and wonder what deep spiritual insight they were missing. Perhaps he was speaking another language?

If my brother felt in a particularly ornery mood, he would quote an alternative verse: “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones” (Ps. 137:9).

In his sassiness my brother had, quite ingeniously, identified the two main barriers to reading the Old Testament: It doesn’t always make sense, and what sense it does make can offend modern ears. Why, we wonder, does the Bible spend so much time on temples, priests, and rules governing sacrifices that no longer even exist? Why does God care about defective sacrificial animals—limping lambs and bent-winged doves—or about a young goat cooked in its mother’s milk, and yet apparently not about people like the Amalekites? Jesus we identify with, the apostle Paul we think we understand; but what of those barbaric people living in the Middle East several thousand years ago?

Because of this, most people simply avoid the Old Testament entirely, leaving three-fourths of the Bible unread, while others extract nuggets of truth from it like plucking diamonds from a vein of coal. That technique can backfire, however—remember my brother’s life verses.

Like reading Shakespeare

For a long time I also avoided the Old Testament. Only gradually, once I started reading it in earnest, did I learn to love it. I confess that I began with ignoble motives: I read the Old Testament because I was paid to, as part of my editorial assignment to produce the Student Bible. But long after the Student Bible had been published and stocked on bookstore shelves, I kept returning to the Old Testament on my own.

My reading experience parallels one I had with William Shakespeare. In a moment of idealism, I made a New Year’s resolution to read all 38 of Shakespeare’s plays in one year. To my surprise, fulfilling the task (though I had to extend the deadline) seemed far more like entertainment than work. At first I would have to look up archaic words, concentrate on keeping the characters straight, and adjust to the sheer awkwardness of reading plays. I found, though, that as I kept at it and got accustomed to the rhythm and language, these distractions faded and I felt myself being swept up in the play. Without fail I looked forward to the designated Shakespeare evenings.

I expected to learn about Shakespeare’s world and the people who inhabited it. I found, though, that Shakespeare mainly taught me about my world. He endures as a playwright because of his genius in probing the hidden recesses of humanity, a skill that gives him appeal in places as varied as the United States, Japan, and Peru several centuries after his death. We find ourselves in his plays.

I went through precisely that same process in encountering the Old Testament. From initial resistance, I moved to a reluctant sense that I ought to read the neglected three-quarters of the Bible. As I worked past some of the barriers, I came to feel a need to read, because of what it was teaching me. Eventually, I found myself wanting to read it. Those 39 books satisfied in me some hunger that nothing else had—not even, I must say, the New Testament. They taught me about life with God: not how it is supposed to work, but how it actually does work.

The rewards offered by the Old Testament do not come easily, I admit. Learning to feel at home in its pages will take time and effort. All achievements—climbing mountains, mastering the guitar, competing in a triathlon—require a similar process of hard work; we persevere because we believe rewards will come.

A reader of the Old Testament confronts obstacles not present in other books. For example, I was put off at first by its disarray. The Old Testament does not read like a cohesive novel; it consists of poetry, history, sermons, and short stories written by various authors and mixed up together. In its time, of course, no one conceived of the Old Testament as one book. Each book had its own scroll, and a long book like Jeremiah would occupy a scroll 20 or 30 feet long. A Jewish person entering a synagogue would see stacks of scrolls, not a single book, and, aware of their differences, would choose accordingly.

Yet I find it remarkable that this diverse collection of manuscripts written over a period of a millennium by several dozen authors possesses as much unity as it does. To appreciate this feat, imagine a book begun 500 years before Columbus and just now completed. The Bible’s striking unity is one strong sign that God directed its composition. By using a variety of authors and cultural situations, God developed a complete record of what he wants us to know; amazingly, the parts fit together in such a way that a single story does emerge.

The more I persevered, the more passages I came to understand. And the more I understood, the more I found myself in those passages. Even in a culture as secular as the United States, bestsellers such as The Care of the Soul, by Thomas Moore, and The Cloister Walk, by Kathleen Norris, reveal a deep spiritual hunger. The Old Testament speaks to that hunger like no other book. It does not give us a lesson in theology, with abstract concepts neatly arranged in logical order. Quite the opposite: it gives an advanced course in Life with God, expressed in a style at once personal and passionate.

Neither testament is enough

Christians of all stripes hold one thing in common: We believe the Old Testament is not enough. Jesus the Messiah came to introduce a “New Covenant,” or New Testament, and following the apostle Paul we look back on the Old Testament period as a time of preparation. Without question, I agree. Yet I am increasingly convinced that neither is the New Testament enough. On its own, it proves insufficient for understanding God or our world.

When Thomas Cahill wrote the book The Gifts of the Jews, he chose as the subtitle “How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels.” He is surely right. Western civilization builds so directly on foundations laid in the Old Testament era that it would not otherwise make sense. As Cahill points out, the Jewish belief in monotheism gave us a Great Whole, a unified universe that can, as a product of one Creator, be studied and manipulated scientifically. Ironically, our technological modern world traces back to that tribe of desert nomads.

The Jews also gave us what Cahill calls the Conscience of the West, the belief that God expresses himself not primarily through outward show but rather through the “still, small voice” of conscience. A God of love and compassion, he cares about all of his creatures, especially human beings created “in his own image,” and he asks us to do the same. Every person on earth has inherent human dignity. By following that God, the Jews gave us a pattern for the great liberation movements of modern history and for just laws to protect the weak and minorities and the oppressed.

According to Cahill, without the Jews,

we would never have known the abolitionist movement, the prison-reform movement, the antiwar movement, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the movements of indigenous and dispossessed peoples for their human rights, the antiapartheid movement in South Africa, the Solidarity movement in Poland, the free-speech and pro-democracy movements in such Far Eastern countries as South Korea, the Philippines, and even China.

So many of the concepts and words we use daily —new, individual, person, history, freedom, spirit, justice, time, faith, pilgrimage, revolution—derive from the Old Testament that we can hardly imagine the world and our place in it without relying on the Jewish heritage. Our roots go so deep in Old Testament thinking that in many ways—human rights, government, the treatment of neighbors, our understanding of God—we are already speaking and thinking Old Testament.

Most assuredly we cannot understand the New Testament apart from the Old. The proof is simple: try reading Hebrews, Jude, or Revelation without any reference to Old Testament allusions or concepts. It cannot be done (which may explain why many modern Christians avoid those books, too). The Gospels can be read as stand-alone stories, but a reader unacquainted with the Old Testament will miss many layers of richness in them. Paul constantly appealed to the Old Testament. Without exception, every New Testament author wrote about the new work of God on earth while looking through the prism of the earlier or “old” work.

“The old testament contains the prayers jesus prayed, the songs he sang, the bedtime stories he heard as a child.”

A Chinese philosopher insisted on riding his mule backwards so that he would not be distracted by where he was going and could instead reflect on where he had been. The Bible works in somewhat the same way. The Epistles shed light backward on the events of the Gospels, so that we understand them in a new way. Epistles and Gospels both shed light backward on the Old Testament.

For centuries, the phrase “As predicted by the prophets” was one of the most powerful influences on people coming to faith. Justin the Martyr credited his conversion to the impression made on him by the Old Testament’s predictive accuracy. The brilliant French mathematician Blaise Pascal also cites fulfilled prophecies as one of the most important factors in his faith. Nowadays, few Christians read the prophets except in search of Ouija-boardlike clues into the future. We have lost the Reformers’ profound sense of unity between the two testaments.

Reading what Jesus read

Understanding our civilization and understanding the Bible may be important reasons for reading the Old Testament, but perhaps the most important reason is this: it is the Bible Jesus read. He traced in its passages every important fact about himself and his mission. He quoted from it to settle controversies with opponents such as the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Satan himself. The images—Lamb of God, shepherd, sign of Jonah, stone which the builders rejected—that Jesus used to define himself came straight from the pages of the Old Testament.

Once, a government tried to amputate the Old Testament from Christian Scriptures. The Nazis in Germany forbade study of this “Jewish book,” and Old Testament scholarship disappeared from German seminaries and journals. In 1940, at the height of Nazi power, Dietrich Bonhoeffer defiantly published a book on the Psalms and got slapped with a fine. In letters of appeal, he argued convincingly that he was explicating the prayer book of Jesus Christ himself. Jesus quoted often from the Old Testament, Bonhoeffer noted, and never from any other book. Besides, much of the Old Testament explicitly or implicitly points to Jesus.

The Old Testament contains the prayers Jesus prayed, the poems he memorized, the songs he sang, the bedtime stories he heard as a child, the prophecies he pondered. He revered every “jot and tittle” of the Hebrew Scriptures. The more we comprehend the Old Testament, the more we comprehend Jesus. Said Martin Luther, “the Old Testament is a testamental letter of Christ, which he caused to be opened after his death and read and proclaimed everywhere through the Gospel.”

In a poignant passage from his gospel, Luke tells of Jesus spontaneously appearing by the side of two disciples on the road to Emmaus. Even though rumors of his resurrection were spreading like wildfire, clearly these two did not yet believe, as Jesus could tell by looking into their downcast eyes. In a kind of practical joke, Jesus got them to repeat all that had happened to this man Jesus—they had not yet recognized him—over the past few days. Then he gave them a rebuke:

“How foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Christ have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself. (Luke 24:25-27, NIV)

Today we need an “Emmaus road” experience in reverse. The disciples knew Moses and the Prophets but could not conceive how they might relate to Jesus the Christ. The modern church knows Jesus the Christ, but it is fast losing any grasp of Moses and the Prophets. Without the foundation of the Old Testament, we are like the foolish man who built his house on the sand. The house fell with a great crash.

“Quick, what is God like?”

According to Elaine Storkey, that question, “Quick, what is God like?” was asked by a five-year-old girl who rushed up to her newborn brother in his hospital room. The young girl shrewdly figured that, having just come from heaven, he might have some inside information. Alas, he merely made a gurgling sound and rolled his eyes.

The Old Testament provides an answer to the little girl’s question, a different answer than we might get from the New Testament alone. Although Jesus is the “image of the invisible God,” he emptied himself of many of the prerogatives of God in order to become a man. The late professor Langdon Gilkey used to say that if evangelical Christianity has a heresy, it is the neglect of God the Father, the Creator, Preserver, and Ruler of all human history and every human community in favor of Jesus the Son, who relates to individual souls and their destinies.

If we had only the Gospels, we would envision a God who seems confined, all-too-human, and rather weak—after all, Jesus ended up hanging on a cross. His fellow Jews objected so strongly to Jesus because, despite his audacious claims, he did not match their conception of what God is like; they rejected him for not measuring up. The Book of Revelation gives a different glimpse of Jesus—blazing light, stunning in glory, unlimited in power—and the Old Testament likewise fills in a different portrayal of God. Like Jesus’ original disciples, we need that background picture in order to appreciate how much love was involved in the Incarnation—how much God gave up on our behalf.

Apart from the Old Testament we will always have an impoverished view of God. God is not a philosophical construct, but a Person who acts in history: the one who created Adam, who gave a promise to Noah, who called Abraham, and introduced himself by name to Moses, who deigned to live in a wilderness “tent” in order to live close to his people.

“In his own history, God does not seem impressed by size or power or wealth. Faith is what he wants, and the heroes who emerge are heroes of faith, not strength or wealth.”

I admit that the Old Testament introduces some problems I would rather avoid. “Consider therefore the kindness and sternness of God,” wrote Paul to the Christians in Rome. I would rather consider only the kindness of God, but by doing so I would construct my own image of God instead of relying on God’s self-revelation. I dare not speak for God without listening to God speak for himself. The Old Testament portrays God as a stern father but also a kind one, a lion but also a lamb, an eagle but also a mother hen, a king but also a servant, a judge but also a shepherd. Just when we think we have God pinned down, the Old Testament introduces a whole new picture of him: as a whistler, a barber, a vineyard keeper.

I remember hearing a chapel message at Wheaton College during the 1970s, when the Death of God movement had reached its peak. Prof. Robert Webber chose to speak on the third commandment, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” We usually interpret that commandment in a narrow sense of prohibiting swearing, said Webber, who then proceeded to expand its meaning to, “Never live as though God does not exist.” Or, stated positively, “Always live in awareness of God’s existence.” The more I study the commandment in its Old Testament environment, the more I agree with Webber. Any key to living in such awareness must be found in the great Jewish legacy of the Old Testament.

I do not propose that we return to earlocks, phylacteries, and a diet that excludes pork and lobster—reminders to the Jewish people that this world revolves around God, not us. Nevertheless, I do believe we have much to learn from a people whose daily lives centered on God. When we look back on the covenant between God and the ancient Hebrews, what stands out to us is its strictness, the seeming arbitrariness of some of its laws. I see no such reaction among the Hebrews themselves. Few of them pleaded with God to loosen the dietary restrictions or eliminate some of their religious obligations. They seem, rather, relieved that their God, unlike the pagan gods around them, had agreed to define a relationship with them.

As the Puritan scholar Perry Miller has said: When you have a covenant with God, you no longer have an ineffable, remote, unapproachable Deity; you have a God you can count on. The Hebrews and God had entered into a kind of story together, and everything about their lives sent back echoes of that story. The story was a love story, from the very beginning. God chose the Hebrews not because they were larger and stronger than other tribes—quite the contrary. Nor did he choose them for their moral superiority. He chose them because he loved them.

Like any starstruck lover, God yearned for a response. All the commands given the Hebrews flowed out of the very first commandment, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” The Hebrews failed to keep that command, we know, but the reason Christians now call three-fourths of the Bible the “Old” Testament is that not even that terrible failure could cancel out God’s love. God found a new way—a new covenant, or testament, of his love.

Is God really good?

For thousands of years, the Jews have prayed this prayer: “Give thanks to the Lord Almighty, for the Lord is good; his love endures forever.” It makes a good prayer to reflect on, because we doubt precisely those two things today. Is the Lord good? Does his love endure forever? A glance at history, or any day’s headlines, and any reasonable person begins to wonder about those bold assertions. For this reason, too, the Old Testament merits our attention, for the Jews loudly doubted the very prayer they prayed. As befitting an intimate relationship, they took those doubts to the other party, to God himself, and got a direct response.

We learn from the Old Testament how God works, which is not at all as we might expect. God moves slowly, unpredictably, paradoxically. The first 11 chapters of Genesis describe a series of human failures that call the entire creation project into question. As a remedy to those failures, God declares a plan in Genesis 12: to deal with the general problem of humanity by establishing one particular family, a tribe later known as the Hebrews. Through them, the womb for the Incarnation, God will bring about restoration of the entire earth, back to its original design.

That plan declared, God proceeds in a most mysterious manner. To found his tribe, God chooses a pagan from the region that is now Iraq, and puts him through a series of tests, many of which he fails. In Egypt, for example, Abraham demonstrates a morality inferior to that of the sun worshipers.

After promising to bring about a people numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore, God then proceeds to conduct a clinic in infertility. Abraham and Sarah wait into their nineties to see their first child; their daughter-in-law, Rebekah, proves barren for a time; her son Jacob must wait 14 years for the wife of his dreams, only to discover her barren as well. Three straight generations of infertile women hardly seems an efficient way to populate a great nation.

After making similar promises to bring about possession of a great land (Abraham himself possessed only a gravesite in Canaan), God arranges a detour for the Israelites into Egypt, where they live for “four centuries” until Moses arrives to lead them out of slavery to the Promised Land—a wretched journey that takes 40 years instead of the expected two weeks. Clearly, God operates on a different timetable than that used by impatient human beings.

The surprises continue on into New Testament times, for none of the vaunted Jewish scholars recognizes Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah trumpeted in the Psalms and Prophets. In fact, they continue today as self-appointed prophets confidently identify a succession of tyrants and world figures as the Antichrist, only to see Hitler, Stalin, and Kissinger fade from view.

Christians living today face many unfulfilled promises. World poverty and population continue to soar, and as a percentage of population, Christianity barely holds its own. The planet lurches toward self-destruction. We wait, and keep on waiting, for the glory days promised in the Prophets and in Revelation. From Abraham and Joseph and Moses and David we gain at least the knowledge that God moves in ways we would not predict or even desire. At times God’s history seems to operate on an entirely different plane from ours.

The Old Testament gives clues into the kind of history God is writing. Exodus identifies by name the two Hebrew midwives who helped save Moses’ life but does not bother to record the name of the Pharaoh ruling Egypt (an omission that has baffled scholars ever since). First Kings grants a total of eight verses to King Omri, even though secular historians regard him as one of Israel’s most powerful kings. In his own history, God does not seem impressed by size or power or wealth. Faith is what he wants, and the heroes who emerge are heroes of faith, not strength or wealth.

God’s history thus focuses on those who hold faithful to him, regardless of how things turn out. When Nebuchadnezzar, one of many tyrants who persecute the Jews, threatens three young men with torture by fire, they respond: “If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O king. But even if he does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up” (Dan. 3:17-18, NIV).

Empires rise and fall, powerful leaders soar to power then topple from it. The same Nebuchadnezzar who tossed these three into a fiery furnace goes crazy, grazing on grass in the field like a cow. The succession of empires that follow his—Persia, Greece, Rome—so mighty in their day, join the dustbin of history even as God’s people the Jews survive murderous pogroms. Slowly, painstakingly, God writes his history on earth through the deeds of his faithful followers, one by one.

The beseeching Lover

Out of their tortured history, the Jews demonstrate the most surprising lesson of all: You cannot go wrong personalizing God. God is not a blurry power living somewhere in the sky, not an abstraction like the Greeks proposed, not a sensual superhuman like the Romans worshiped, and definitely not the absentee Watchmaker of the Deists. God is “personal.” He enters into people’s lives, messes with families, shows up in unexpected places, chooses unlikely leaders, calls people to account. Most of all, God loves.

As the great Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel put it,

To the prophet, God does not reveal Himself in an abstract absoluteness, but in a personal and intimate relation to the world. He does not simply command and expect obedience; He is also moved and affected by what happens in the world, and reacts accordingly. Events and human actions arouse in Him joy or sorrow, pleasure or wrath … man’s deeps may move Him, affect Him, grieve Him or, on the other hand, gladden and please Him . …

[T]he God of Israel is a God Who loves, a God Who is known to, and concerned with, man. He not only rules the world in the majesty of His might and wisdom, but reacts intimately to the events of history.

More than any other word pictures, God chooses “children” and “lovers” to describe our relationship with him as being intimate and personal. The Old Testament abounds with husband-bride imagery. God woos his people and dotes on them like a lover doting on his beloved. When they ignore him, he feels hurt, spurned, like a jilted lover. Shifting metaphors, it also announces that we are God’s children. In other words, the closest we can come to understanding how God looks upon us is by thinking about the people who mean most to us: our own child, our lover.

Think of a doting parent with a video camera, coaxing his year-old daughter to let go of the living room coffee table and take three steps toward him. “Come on, sweetie, you can do it! Just let go. Daddy’s here. Come on.” Think of a love-struck teenager with her phone permanently attached to her ear, reviewing every second of her day with a boy who is himself infatuated enough to be interested. Think of those two scenes, and then imagine God on one end and you on the other. That is the message of the Old Testament.

From a forthcoming book, The Bible Jesus Read, by Philip Yancey, to be published by Zondervan Publishing House (Grand Rapids, Mich.) in August 1999.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

The faithful are fatter than ever—at least in this country—according to Kenneth Ferraro, a sociologist at the University of Purdue. His analysis of data from two national surveys, published in the Review of Religious Research last March, shows that religious people tend to be more corpulent than their nonreligious counterparts. His findings apply to all major religions in the United States, though American Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists on average weigh less than American Christians.

States with a high rate of religious affiliation—Mississippi, Michigan, and Indiana—have heftier citizens than such strongholds of secularity as Massachusetts, Hawaii, and Colorado. And among denominations, Southern Baptists are the real heavyweights.

Having eaten at Southern Baptist tables every day for the first two decades of my life and intermittently thereafter, I think I know the reason: the food is irresistible. “Southness,” in fact, shows up as an indicator of obesity in Ferraro’s study. While a person may possibly sustain life on the Lutheran fare lampooned on Prairie Home Companion—tuna hot dish and Jell-O salad—when you eat Sunday dinner at my relatives’ tables, you see the point of going to heaven. I grew up believing the celestial banquet table would be spread with fried chicken, buttered biscuits, and pecan pie throughout all eternity.

If Southern Baptists had an official patron saint, it might be Thomas Aquinas, whose 300-pound bulk led his fellow students to nickname him Ox. To judge by the paintings of emaciated saints of the period, however, the massive Aquinas was a rarity in the Middle Ages. Indeed, until recently, our models of piety have been hollow-cheeked, verging on gaunt, as portrayed by painters from Giotto to El Greco. Fasting and toiling at good works appears to have kept the pious whittled down to size in the past. Not having potato chips and ice cream readily available probably didn’t hurt, either. Actually, Christian aversion to fat began even earlier, when a fourth-century monk named John Cassian included gluttony on his list of the Seven Deadly Sins, reflecting the monastic movement’s grounding in asceticism.

All the same, the word fat is never mentioned in the New Testament, with the exception of the “fatted” calf the Prodigal’s father kills to welcome his son home. Though Jesus was accused by his enemies of being both a drunkard and a glutton, famine appears to have been a more pressing problem for the early church than weight-watching.

It’s quite a different story in the Old Testament, however. The Israelite economy was based on cattle and farming. Taking their cue from prudent farmers and herdsmen who stored up food in barns or silos for the future, the general populace figured that extra pounds might insure their survival during periods of crop failure and famine. Reflecting this positive attitude toward plumpness, the Old Testament has at least ten different words for fat, the largest proportion appearing in Leviticus where butchers are instructed to leave the fat on animals slaughtered for sacrifice. Presumably, the “sweet smell of sacrifice” resembled the tantalizing odors drifting from the steak- house grills today.

Eglon, the king of Moab, is the only person specifically described as fat, in the third chapter of Judges, where Ehud, a Benjamite, under the guise of bringing tribute to the king, uses the occasion to assassinate him. As Ehud plunges his 18-inch dagger into the king’s stomach, “the fat closed over it,” hilt and all.

In contrast to this gruesome scene, most of the references to fat in the Hebrew Scriptures are favorable, a sign of prosperity and well-being. Cattle, pastures, even the land itself are all—when in good condition and well watered—described as fat. In Psalm 92 a tree, used as a metaphor for the righteous, is “fat and flourishing.” Fat, instead of being a sign of neurosis or a weak will, was virtually synonymous with being successful and rich. And Proverbs, with its usual benevolence toward the hard-working and upstanding citizen, promises that “the soul of the diligent,” as well as the one who “putteth his trust in the Lord shall be made fat” (Prov. 13:4; 28:25). Likewise, “a good report maketh the bones fat” (Prov. 15:30).

Only when the prosperous become arrogant and oppressive is fat negatively nuanced. The eyes of the arrogant affluent “stand out with fat” (Ps. 73:7), and their hearts are either “as fat as grease” (Ps. 119:70) or “inclosed in their own fat” (Ps. 17:10). Though Isaiah castigates the heedless Israelites for having fat hearts (Isa. 6:10), the prophet also characterizes the future blessedness of the redeemed as a time when the Lord will “make unto all people a feast of fat things” (Isa. 25:6).

I should point out, though, that you will find these references to fat—whether positive or negative—only if you’re using the Authorized Version of the Bible, otherwise known as the King James Version. Completed in 1611 during the age of Shakespeare, its vocabulary usually sticks closer to the Hebrew text than most later renditions. The Renaissance scholars and poets who produced the Authorized Version did not shrink from using a word that, for some reason, has been shunned by later translators.

I suspect that fat has melted from the pages of both the Revised Standard Version (1952) and the New International Version (1978) for reasons other than literary taste. Neither of those versions employs the more accurate term fat in any of the texts I have cited above, nor in many others like them. Instead, fat is universally rendered “rich” or “prosperous” in those passages, despite the fact that Hebrew is also well stocked with words specifically equivalent to “rich” or “prosperous.” Indeed, in the RSV and NIV, the word is applied only to the hapless Eglon and to livestock, including the calf destined for the Prodigal’s banquet. Isaiah’s messianic banquet, however, is fat-free. The God-fearing good citizen of Proverbs is not allowed an extra ounce. And the arrogant rich of the prophets and psalmist, rather than having greasy and fat-encased hearts, are simply called “callous.”

What changes in our economy and our cultural attitudes does the disappearance of fat from twentieth-century Bibles reflect? For one thing, that it’s easy to be fat in America today. The ancient world may have been populated with lean farmers and herdsmen, struggling to eke out a living, but our citizens today work mostly indoors and sitting down. For another thing, poor people are statistically more likely to be overweight than rich people, even the ones we call “fat cats.” Also, the more education you have, the fewer pounds you carry. A factory worker is almost certain to weigh more than the ceo who runs the company. Thus, the whole fat-equals-rich equation of the ancient world has been reversed.

Besides the socioeconomic stigma attached to fat today, obesity has become one of the few sins recognized in the secular realm. Perhaps sin is too strong a word. But ask any lean jogger or hardbodied weight lifter which they’d rather be—fat or unfaithful, chubby or a tax-cheat, obese or ornery—and see what answer you get. Fat, if not sinful, is at best unfortunate, at worst obscene. In this culture, we pity the anorexic, but we avoid the obese.

Despite this relatively recent reversal in cultural attitude, our pews groan under the corpulent. In fact, the Purdue study shows that, even when such factors as ethnicity, education, income, and socioeconomic status are adjusted for, religious people in America still show a greater tendency toward obesity than their secularized counterparts. (Marketers must also be aware of this trend; I recently heard a commercial on a Christian radio station for a “dietary supplement” called Fat-Absorb.) In fact, the more religious you are, the fatter you tend to be. (I suspect a minor flaw in the researchers’ techniques on this point was using as one of the indicators for a person’s piety “watching or listening to religious tv or radio.” All couch potatoes are probably roughly equivalent in bulk, whether they are watching Pat Robertson or Monday Night Football.)

Still, the study raises all sorts of unanswered questions. What accounts for the increase in total poundage of church membership today? There appears to be no New Testament precedent for particularly plump Christians. Besides, the tendency applies to adherents of all religions in this country. Does twentieth-century spirituality exert some strange gravitational pull on larger bodies? Are fat people in our culture simply prone toward piety? Is overweight indeed the sign of a weak will, which Nietzsche claimed was a characteristic of the religiously inclined?

The Purdue sociologist found yet another arresting piece of data in his study, though, which further complicates the issue. For while religious people are demonstrably fatter, obesity seems to have fewer ill effects on active church members than on either their secular counterparts or the nominally religious. Of course, earlier studies have already shown that, in most cases, actively practicing one’s religion is the most consistent predictor of overall well-being in our culture. Such an effect has generally been attributed to healthier living among the faithful—less smoking and alcohol consumption, abstention from drugs and casual sex. But the Purdue study shows that religious overeaters somehow escape the ill effects of their bad habit—specifically, depression and a diminished sense of well-being.

In other words, forget trying to find comfort in church if you only intend to be a passive pew potato. But practice what you preach—or at least join a Bible study as well as show up for worship services—and you’ll be both healthier and happier, even though you don’t lose a pound.

It would be easy to give such results a triumphalist twist: calories don’t count—at least for true believers. But Ferraro suggests another reason that church members are fat and happy. Though he hesitates to infer that “religion may actually promote higher body weight,” he does suggest two possible causes for the increase in total volume of church members. First, while Christians generally hold the line against alcoholism, smoking, and sexual promiscuity, they have tacitly agreed to strike gluttony from the list of the Deadly Seven. Indeed, the study showed “no evidence of religion constraining body weight in America.” Fat is rarely railed against from the pulpit. (I could add that it’s also harder to hide than other bad habits. Overeaters cannot really be anonymous.)

Second, Ferraro suggests that religion’s current “emphasis upon tolerating human weakness” leads to larger members. At present, the primary theological theme in both liberal and conservative churches is unconditional love, being accepted just as we are. Ferraro credits “the silence of many American denominations on excess body weight and religion’s function as a vehicle of social acceptance” for providing a safety net necessary for catching the really big fish.

Should we feel glad or guilty that the church has become a haven for heavyweights? Or should preachers rev up their repertoire to take on gluttony—perhaps after paring down their own paunches? Should churches launch a “Just Say No to Potlucks” campaign? Answer “diet” to the question “What Would Jesus Do?”

On my shelf of cookbooks, between Betty Crocker and Larousse Gastronomique sits a copy of First Place Favorites, a collection of low-fat recipes published by the First Baptist Church of Houston. It was given to me by a 78-year-old friend who has been one of the spiritual giants in my life. She weighs roughly 250 pounds. A couple of years ago, she lost 50 pounds by attending a Christian version of Weight Watchers at her church, an experience she found physically, socially, and spiritually exhilarating. Unfortunately, she gained the weight back after she graduated from the program and hasn’t lost an ounce since. Through thick and thin, however, she remains one of the most devoted, compassionate, and guileless Christians I know.

I don’t know the answer to the question the Purdue study raised. I do suspect churches of complicity in promoting gluttony. Practically every circle, study, and board meeting seems to require trays of tea sandwiches or donuts, depending on the dominant gender in attendance. Church members who would blanch at Bingo in the fellowship hall don’t bat an eye at church suppers, despite Paul’s explicit directive to the Corinthians: “If any man hunger, let him eat at home.”

Nevertheless, it’s hard to imagine those words coming from the mouth of Jesus, who showed up at dinner parties so often he was accused of being not only a glutton but a drunkard and a “friend of sinners.” We now pride ourselves on avoiding such epithets. But maybe this is where corpulence, being such an outward and visible sign, can be of spiritual help. If fat people are the new class of outcasts, maybe they can bring us back to our calling of associating with the socially unacceptable.

What would Jesus do? Take a fat person to dinner.

Virginia Stem Owens is author of Daughters of Eve (NavPress) and Looking for Jesus (Westminster John Knox), to be published this spring. She lives in Huntsville, Texas.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” No, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

—Romans 12:9-21, NRSV

In Romans 12 Paul preaches his own version of the Sermon on the Mount. In 13 short verses he turns out 30 instructions, all of them meant to put flesh on the bones of Christ’s one commandment of love. Paul had good reason for going to so much trouble. The church in Rome was splitting apart in at least two different ways. Inside, by conflict between Jewish and Gentile Christians. And outside, by conflict between Christian and non-Christian Romans. There were black eyes and bad feelings all over the place. Marcus went to the midweek service so he would not have to sit in the same room with Clovis on Sunday; Lucius was so mad at both of them that he had quit coming to church at all; and Chloe had just bought herself a pit bull to keep her pagan neighbors from cutting through her yard.

It was a mess, all the way around. People said they believed that God was love. They said they believed in the power of goodness—at least until someone crossed them. Then goodness and love fell pretty much by the wayside and retaliation turned out to be what they believed in after all. If you have ever been on the receiving end of a really grievous wrong, then you know how your mind works.

This is wrong, you tell yourself. I am in a lot of pain here. This should not have happened to me. Someone should pay for this. Evildoers must be stopped, and if I don’t do it, someone else will get hurt. It’s not my nature, but I will strike back. I will fight fire with fire. God is a God of justice, after all, and what has happened to me is not right, not by any reckoning.

That is how it usually works. Then the lawsuit is filed, the insult is returned, the line is drawn, and the cold war begins, full of stony silence and clenched teeth. Because something deep down inside of us believes that we will be annihilated if we do not fight back.

Where there’s a will

I still remember my nephew Will’s first birthday party. He was as round and bald as a Buddha at that point, still hovering on the verge of speech. Never out of his parents’ sight, he was a typical only child—used to being the center of attention—only he was not spoiled yet, because he had not yet learned how to manipulate love for his own ends. He just thought everyone was loved the way he was, and he gave it away as fast as he got it.

There was only a handful of us there that day—Will’s parents, aunts, and grandparents, plus his godparents and their seven-year-old son, Jason. After the cake and the singing and the presents were all over, Will let us know how pleased he was by doing his new dance for us—a shy twirling in place that he had invented several days before with lots of fancy arm work.

We were all circled around him admiring his dance when Jason simply could not stand it anymore. He charged through the circle, put both of his hands on Will’s chest, and shoved. Will fell hard. His rear end hit first, then his head, with a crack. He looked utterly surprised at first. No one had ever hurt him before, and he did not know what to make of it. Then he opened up his mouth and howled, but not for long. His mother hugged him and helped him to his feet, and the first thing Will did was to totter over to Jason. He knew Jason was at the bottom of this thing, only since no one had ever been mean to him before he did not know what the thing was. So he did what he had always done. He put his arms around Jason and laid his head against that mean little boy’s body; and at that moment, all my Christian conviction went right out the door.

“I will buy him a BB gun for his next birthday,” I thought. “Iron knuckles. A karate video for toddlers.” It just about killed me to think how that sweet child would have to learn to defend himself; but it was either that or eat dust on the playground the rest of his life, with some bully’s foot on the back of his head.

Only, according to Paul, Will was right and I was wrong. “Do not repay anyone evil for evil,” he wrote to the Romans, “but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all.” What Will did to Jason put an end to the meanness in that room. What I wanted to do to Jason would only have multiplied it. Paul’s advice is idealistic, impractical, and dangerous to one’s health; but there it is: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

Conquering the enemy within

All I can figure is that Paul had incredible faith in the power of love, faith that most of us either do not share or are not eager to test. He seemed to understand that the real enemy is not whoever pushes us down in the middle of our dance but whatever it is inside of us that wants to leap up and push back. Evil is never satisfied with controlling one side of a situation. Its goal is to infect everyone involved—the victim along with the bully, the plaintiff along with the defendant, the offended along with the offender. When everyone has his or her dukes in the air and there is a loaded gun in every household (did you know that is a city ordinance in Kennesaw, Georgia?), then the enemy will have won, because the whole point is to recruit the good guys by making them believe they are stopping the bad guys.

That is not how to do it! Paul says, “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.” Because the moment you curse them, you join them; and however good it may feel at the moment, it is still a surrender. The only way to conquer evil is to absorb it, Paul says. Take it into yourself and disarm it. Neutralize its acids. Serve as a charcoal filter for its smog. Suck it up, put a straitjacket on it, and turn it over to God, so that when you breathe out again the air is pure.

It is an incredible dare, and Paul apparently knows that very few of us will accept it unless there is something in it for us, so he adds a little bonus near the end. “If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” Nice talk, Paul. Convince us to care for our enemies by telling us how much it will hurt them if we do!

I don’t know what that crazy sentence is all about. Martin Luther thought it meant that those who are converted by love “burn against themselves” once they have discovered what they have been missing. All I know is that the first half of the sentence renders the second half harmless. People who come upon their enemies in a weakened state and who resist the temptation to take advantage of them—who help them instead, giving those who have hurt them food and drink—those people are already out of danger. By the time they have packed the picnic basket and filled the Thermos with pink lemonade, I guarantee you they will have forgotten about the burning coal part. “Do I not conquer my enemy,” said Abraham Lincoln, “by making him my friend?”

Breaking the cycle

There is nothing sentimental or the least bit easy about any of this. There is not even a guarantee that it will work, but one thing is for sure: When we repay evil with evil, evil is all there is, in bigger and more toxic piles. The only way to reverse the process is to behave in totally unexpected ways—blessing the persecutor, feeding the enemy, embracing the bully—breaking the vicious cycle by refusing to participate in it anymore.

That is what love is, Paul says: not a warm feeling between like-minded friends but plain old imitation of Christ, who took all the meanness of the world and ran it through the filter of his own body, repaying evil with good, blame with pardon, death with life. Call it divine reverse psychology. It worked once, and it can work again, whenever God can find someone else willing to give it a try.

From God in Pain: Teaching Sermons on Suffering (Abingdon), by Barbara Brown Taylor, who holds the Harry R. Butman Chair in Religion and Philosophy, Piedmont College, Demorest, Georgia.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

It’s past 8 o’clock on a Wednesday night and Randy Gambony of Chicago’s Emmaus Ministries hoists a sack full of paperback Bibles and free personal hygiene kits onto his shoulder.

For the next six hours, until 2 a.m., he and his Emmaus partner will cruise the city’s mean streets and bars reaching out to male prostitutes. As he walks through the River North area, Gambony wears a name badge, T-shirt, and a baseball cap stamped with the Emmaus name and logo. His goal is to build relationships, meet a need, and—somewhere in the process—share his own story about how Jesus turned his life around.

Gambony was in prison when Emmaus was launched in 1990, the brainchild of John Green, who was attending Wheaton College when exposure to Chicago’s inner city broke his heart. Green eventually relocated to New York, working with teenage runaways. But he could not forget Chicago’s young male hustlers. He returned to Wheaton for graduate school and later started Emmaus.

Green says, “Some Christians tell me, ‘Those guys on the street make choices.’ But I say: They don’t have the same choices as you and I. Many are school dropouts. They come from broken homes and are often homeless.

“The majority of them still consider themselves heterosexual, even though their tricks or clients are hom*osexual.” Many are also drug abusers working to feed their addiction. “The drug habit keeps them hustling. It’s a vicious cycle. Our goal is to make Jesus known to them and to give them a way out.”

Emmaus methods are threefold: First, ministry teams make contact and build relationships with male hustlers. Next, a second team, also walking the streets, focuses on prayer. Third, a nearby drop-in center offers a meal, laundry facilities, showers, a clothes closet, a telephone, and Bible discussions.

Quicker turnaround

Gambony says maybe his life would have turned around more quickly if Emmaus had been around when he lived in the same neighborhood Emmaus serves.

After his father deserted the family, Gambony was on his own at 16, unable to read or write, surviving by his wits. “I didn’t hustle my body, but that’s about the only thing I didn’t sell. I was a mess.”

After halting his own downward spiral with the intervention of Christian friends, Gambony earned a college degree and now attends seminary near Chicago.

Four nights a week, he reaches out to young men who walk on the wild side. “They know me by name,” Gambony says of the men on his beat. “They know I’ll always be around at the same time in the same place. It takes a long time to build trust.”

On the corner of one sidestreet, a tall, handsome man approaches Gambony, who says, “What’s happening? Can you use a dop kit? It’s got toothpaste, toothbrush, deodorant, shaving cream, disposable razor, aspirin, and a comb.”

The man takes the kit. “Thanks. Who are you guys with?”

Gambony replies, “Emmaus Ministries. Our number is printed right there on the side of the bag.”

“Oh, yeah!” The man’s eyes light up. “I’ve got your card.” He reaches into a pocket and pulls out a well-worn Emmaus business card with the center’s address and 800 number. “I keep it with me, just in case.”

“Why not come by our drop-in center tomorrow for lunch? Then you can tell me what we can do to help you get off the street.” The young man mumbles a noncommittal answer and moves on.

Gambony spots another man sitting on the steps of a dimly lit entryway in hospital scrubs. He sits down alongside him and strikes up a conversation. The act of sitting down beside the man is intentional—assuming the attitude of a peer.

“I need help getting my state id card,” the man says. Without the photo id card, which serves as substitute identification in the absence of a driver’s license, he cannot apply for a job, access food pantries, or even get some housing.

Gambony explains how he can help and how the young man can use Emmaus’s address for mailing purposes or use their phone number for call-backs on job interviews.

The man eagerly accepts a dop kit and the Bible offered, saying poignantly, “I know it’s not right to sell my body. My mother was a God-fearing woman. But I’ve got aids, and I can’t get a job.”

Gambony doesn’t debate the man’s logic or question the truthfulness of his story. He shares a brief testimony and offers to pray for the man, which the man eagerly accepts.

Emmaus ministers know that leaving the street is harder than it looks to outsiders looking in. Progress comes very slowly. George, 38, is one of the ministry’s success stories. He says, “My heart could feel the compassion the Emmaus folks showed me, but my mind kept following the demands of my body.”

George had several relapses before he finally accepted Christ and left the street for good. He now lives with John Green and his wife in the Emmaus six-flat building above the drop-in center.

Emmaus helped George get into a detox program. He has been “clean” for 14 months.

“I was helping people go to hell when I was on the street,” George says. “Now I help them go to heaven. I would still be on crack or probably dead if God hadn’t put Emmaus people in my life.”

Immersion Nights

John Green says learning to extend Christian love to male prostitutes requires a paradigm shift for most Christians. So Emmaus offers carefully structured Immersion Nights for Christian adults.

The groups gather at the drop-in center for an hour-long briefing. Then they are sent into the areas where Emmaus ministers. One particular night, a group of 15 Christian postcollege students from a Presbyterian church in Seattle are about to get a look at Chicago’s dark side. They are spending a full week in Chicago getting hands-on experience in different urban ministries.

Green urges them to have the attitude of learners and to sit on their opinions. “This is not a night for evangelism,” he tells them. “This is a night for conversation. You’re on their turf. Respect that. Sit in one bar for at least an hour to get a truer sense of their world. Pay attention to what you are seeing and feeling, and come back with five observations.”

He issues a special caution about the p*rnography they will encounter. “Guard your mind. Many of the bars show p*rnographic hom*osexual videos on the tvs. Sit under the tv sets so you won’t have to look at them.”

The group is broken down into male-female pairs, given a map of the neighborhood, and told to return in four hours for a debriefing session.

When the group reassembles around midnight, their feedback tells Green the immersion has had the desired effect.

A clean-cut man in his mid-20s chimes in, “The guy I spoke with was a guy like me in many ways. I enjoyed talking with him. He asked if we knew we were in a gay bar—since we stuck out—but everyone was very friendly to us.”

Another participant said, “It struck me, as I was sitting in the bar, that this was where Jesus would have hung out if he were here. And he was there, in me.”

Green says, “Christians come here hoping to evangelize the street. But night ministry evangelizes them. It challenges their preconceived notions. The church has a tough time dealing with hom*osexuals. But when you sit down and have a conversation with an actual person, it’s no longer a dictionary term. The issue suddenly has a name and a face.”

Today, 30 churches support Emmaus. Alfred Coleman, Emmaus coordinator, says, “The biggest myth about this ministry is that it’s difficult. It’s no different than taking food to the elderly or leading a Bible study. We’re all doing God’s business.”

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

When I was first approached about becoming a member of the Spice Girls, I was a little taken aback. My impression was that this troupe of British singers was salacious and provocative, one more example of the debasing of our culture.

“I’m embarassed to admit it, Mom,” my 21-year-old daughter confessed, “but I actually liked the movie. It’s harmless—a teenybopper thing, like for preteen girls. It’s singing Barbies, and there’s nothing dirty about it. It has that nutty English humor, kind of like the Beatles’ Help!, so I actually ended up really enjoying it—I even watched it twice.”

We rented Spice World that evening and studied it, side by side on the couch in the darkened living room. At the end I was satisfied that the Spice Girls remained decently clothed and did not veer into inappropriate innuendo. The movie, though lighter than fluff, even had a quirky charm. I picked up the phone and gave my decision: yes, I would consent to be a Spice Girl.

Thus it was that two weeks later at the church picnic I was clothed in a babydoll dress (with modest shorts underneath), a blonde wig in pigtails, and white knee-high socks with shiny, black Mary Jane shoes. I was attempting to portray “Baby Spice,” and at five foot one I approach her size—vertically, anyway. The skit was designed by the youth group to say good-bye to their leader, who was heading off to seminary. Why’s he going to seminary? “‘Cos that’s what he wants, what he really really wants,” we sang.

“We” included me and the church secretary (“Sporty Spice”), and one of the basses from the choir (“Ginger Spice”). But the teens’ hope of having an all-grownup Spice Girls was not fulfilled. Several adults turned the parts down, feeling uneasy about what seemed an endorsem*nt of questionable pop culture.

Questioning pop culture is something Christians don’t do often enough. We tend to absorb it unresisting, turning on the radio at the beginning of the day and the television at the end, scarcely aware of how much mental junk food we are ingesting. How much energy Christians spend on political battles to prevent outside forces from damaging the family—and how gladly they welcome into the home poisons that do much worse.

So why is it OK to dress up as the Spice Girls? Because there is a difference between passively absorbing pop culture and critiquing it. We were hijacking this pop icon in order to laugh at it, exaggerating the costumes and style and making it ridiculous. We had examined the phenomenon we were lampooning and ascertained that it was not so corrupt that to mention it at all would be damaging.

When it comes to pop culture, too often Christians choose one of two paths—passive ingestion or total rejection. I think a third way is called for: wise critique. We can’t reach a fallen world if we’re clueless about the ideas and entertainment forming that world day and night, shaping the imagination of the culture and providing a common frame of reference.

We cannot be effective evangelists if we do not, for example, have an idea of what the X-Files is about, and what the show’s popularity indicates about contemporary Americans’ hunger for mystery. We can ask, for example, whether the fascination with eerie space aliens is a reaction to our zeal in expunging mystery from our churches, and turning a faith of miracles and majesty into something we hope looks friendly and accessible. Perhaps we have miscalculated the depth of the human hunger for supernatural reality beyond our everyday lives, and those who can’t find it in our churches are chasing it around the TV dial.

Being informed by pop culture without being formed by it is a goal that requires discipline and caution. Religion columnist Terry Mattingly recommends that families watch only carefully selected prerecorded television, parents with their children beside them and one hand on the remote control, ready to stop, discuss, and analyze what they see. No more than an hour of television a day is sufficient for this. Much else of what passes for entertainment in today’s culture can be observed at a safe remove, through reading reviews and news stories. The goal is awareness and wise critique, neither ignoring the messages that are programming our neighbors (and perhaps rendering them numb to the gospel) nor carelessly ingesting those messages ourselves.

We did the skit in part to make fun of the Spice Girls, but we were also making fun of ourselves. My biggest reluctance to join in this fun was that I was afraid I would look foolish. Turns out I did.

I’ve learned that it’s a good thing for me to look foolish on a regular basis, because otherwise I take my own wisdom and gravity too seriously. I picture myself wisely discerning among the garbage that seduces my gullible neighbors, and forget that I am gullible and foolish in my own ways. Portraying that overtly from time to time is good for me; it helps me get smaller and draw closer to God. And that’s what I want, what I really, really want.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

First, Seek God

So I say to you, seek God and discover Him and make Him a power in your life. Without Him all of our efforts turn to ashes and our sunrises into darkest nights. Without Him life is a meaningless drama with the decisive scenes missing. But with Him we are able to rise from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope. With Him we are able to rise from the midnight of desperation to the daybreak of joy. St. Augustine was right—we were made for God and we will be restless until we find rest in Him.

—Martin Luther King, Jr., in The Words of Martin Luther King Jr., compiled by Coretta Scott King

Of Faith and Science

To look up out at this kind of creation and not believe in God is to me impossible. It just strengthens my faith.

—Astronaut John Glenn at a news conference following his 1998 shuttle flight

God Shows Himself Everywhere

Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time. That is not just fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God shows Himself everywhere, in everything—in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that God is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without Him. It’s impossible. The only thing is is that we don’t see it.

—Thomas Merton in a 1965 audiotape

What the Poor Need

What the poor need, even more than food and clothing and shelter (though they need these, too, desperately), is to be wanted. It is the outcast state their poverty imposes upon them that is the more agonizing.

—Mother Teresa in Something Beautiful for God

What Really Matters

We have to give ourselves wholeheartedly to God, and if we fail, we must give ourselves again. We all need daily forgiveness for our sins and failures. But what matters is whether we want to be faithful—faithful to the end of our lives. This means surrendering everything—our self-will, our hopes for personal happiness, our private property, even our weaknesses—and believing in God and in Christ. This is all that is asked of anyone. Jesus does not expect perfection, but he wants us to give ourselves wholeheartedly.

—J. Heinrich Arnold in Discipleship: Living for Christ in the Daily Grind

Finding Grace

The moment of grace comes to us in the dynamics of any situation we walk into. It is an opportunity that God sews into the fabric of a routine situation. It is a chance to do something creative, something helpful, something healing, something that makes one unmarked spot in the world better off for our having been there. We catch it if we are people of discernment.

—Lewis Smedes in A Pretty Good Person

God Is Our Fuel

God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

—C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity

A Life of Grace

All Christians are considered to have a call to what is commonly termed “the priesthood of all believers”; all are expected to use their lives so as to reveal the grace of the Holy Spirit working through them. It’s a tall order, to literally be a sacrament, and it helps to remember Jesus’ statement in the 15th chapter of John’s Gospel: “You did not choose me; I chose you.”

—Kathleen Norris in Amazing Grace

The Power of Love

No cord or cable can draw so forcibly or bind so fast as love can do with a twined thread.

—Robert Burton in Anatomy of Melancholy

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

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Q: Hebrews 9:27 says, "Man is destined to die once and after that to face the judgment." Does Scripture say why God ends choice for/against Jesus as Savior at physical death? If God were to extend the opportunity for even 30 seconds after physical death, what a difference that might make!

—Paul Gavitt, Tucson, Arizona

A: When the writer of Hebrews speaks of dying "once," he uses a word that means not once merely as distinct from two or more times, but "once and for all." The adverb (hapax in Greek) points to the decisiveness of the event it qualifies; by happening once, the event changes things permanently so that the possibility of it happening again is removed. That is what the word means when it is applied in verses 26 and 28 to Jesus' atoning sacrifice of himself on the cross, and in verse 27 it means the same when applied to the event of our own heartstop and brainstop and the separating of the self from the corpse.

The unrepeatable reality of physical death leads directly to reaping what we sowed in this world. So Jesus taught in his tale of the callous rich man and Lazarus the beggar (Luke 16:19-31), and when he spoke of dying in one's sins as something supremely dreadful (John 8:21-23). So Paul taught when he affirmed that, on judgment day, all received a destiny corresponding to their works; that is, to the decisive direction of their lives (Rom. 2:5-16; Gal. 6:7-8; 2 Cor. 5:10). The New Testament is solid in viewing death and judgment this way.

Modern theologians are not all solid here. Some of them expect that some who did not embrace Christ in this life may yet do so savingly in the life to come. Some who expect this are evangelicals who think that the God of grace owes everyone a clear presentation of the gospel in terms they understand. Others who expect an exercise of postmortem faith are universalists, for whom it is axiomatic that all humans will finally enjoy God in heaven, and therefore that God must and will continue to exert loving pressure till all have been drawn to Christ. So John Hick posits as many postmortem lives for each non-Christian as is necessary to this end, and Nels FerrŽ describes hell as having "a school and a door" in it: when those in hell come to their senses about Christ they may leave, so that the place ends up empty. But this is nonscriptural speculation, and reflects an inadequate grasp of what turning to Christ involves.

What sort of event is "choice for/against Jesus as Savior?" The phrase might suggest it is like choosing the preferred dish from a menu—a choice where you opt for what strikes you as the best of the bunch, knowing that if your first choice is not available, a second is always possible. But coming savingly to Christ is not like that. When it occurs, there is a sense of inevitability about it, springing from three sources: the pressure of gospel truth that feels too certain to be denied, plus the sense of God's presence forcing one to face the reality of Jesus Christ, plus the realization that without him, one is lost, currently ruining oneself and desperately needing to be changed. This sense is generated by God's prevenient grace—his action of making the first move. There is no commitment to Christ (no "choice for Jesus," if one prefers to say it that way) apart from this convicting divine action. The nature and necessity of regeneration (for that is what this is) was never a matter of dispute between Puritan Calvinists and Wesleyan Arminians.

The act of the heart in choosing Jesus Christ is not always performed in a single moment, nor is it always performed calmly and clear-headedly. At surface level there are often crosscurrents of reluctance. C. S. Lewis, dissecting his own conversion story, wrote of "the steady, unrelenting approach of him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet," and scoffed at the idea that anyone really seeks the real God and the real, living Christ, with their dominating, dictatorial demands for discipleship. ("You might as well speak of the mouse's search for the cat.") But in every real conversion, prevenient grace (meaning, as is now clear, the Holy Spirit) ensures a real change of heart through the Calvary love of Christ becoming irresistible.

How a just-dead person's perceptions differ from what they were before is more than we have been told. But Scripture says nothing of prevenient grace triggering postmortem conversions, and that being so, we should conclude that the unbeliever's lack of desire for Christ and the Father and heaven remains unchanged. So for God to extend the offer of salvation beyond the moment of death, even for thirty seconds, would be pointless. Nothing would come of it.

J. I. Packer is visiting scholar at CT and professor emeritus of theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Send your questions for evangelical scholars to cteditor@christianitytoday.com.

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