Killer Comes Calling . . .

Amazon Books

Due to my lingering interest in comparative religions, I sometimes read conversion stories, and I've occasionally reported on them here, especially the unusual ones.

I've never heard a conversion story quite like this one, unexpected and even hard to believe, as told by Virginia Prodan, an international human rights attorney who defended Christians in Communist Romania, as well as an Allied Attorney with the Alliance Defending Freedom. The story below appears in her book, Saving My Assassin (Tyndale), though I came across it as an excerpt:

Late at night, after a long day in court, Miruna, my legal assistant, peeked into my doorway: "A big man in the waiting room says he wants to discuss a case." She shrugged. "That's all he will tell me."

I was taken aback at how enormous he was. As he sat down in front of my desk, his eyes seemed to bore a hole straight through me, and a sneer formed at the corner of his mouth. Slowly, he pulled back his coat and reached into a shoulder holster, . . . drawing a gun. "You have failed to heed the warnings you've been given," he said, aiming at me. "I've come here to finish the matter once and for all." He flexed his fingers, and I heard a distinctive click. "I am here to kill you."

My hands shook. Fight-or-flight instincts pinged in my brain. My chin trembled. An image flashed through my mind: my assistant arriving in the morning and finding my lifeless body on the office floor. I was alone with my killer. And yet, I was not. I began silent, fervent prayers, recalling God's promises. His Spirit breathed peace into my panicked heart. Then I sensed his message: Share the gospel. I considered the man before me. Behind those hate-filled eyes was a creation of God. He had an immortal soul, and he needed to know about the love God has shown in Jesus Christ. At once emboldened, I met my killer's eyes. "Have you ever asked yourself: 'Why do I exist?' or 'Why am I here?' or 'What is the meaning of my life?' I once asked myself those questions." My voice stayed calm and did not waver.

He slid his gun back into the holster.

I leaned forward. "You are here because God put you here, and he has put you to a test. Will you abide in God or in the will of a man - your boss, President Ceausescu, who requires you to worship him? God has given you free will to choose."

His eyes softened.

My heart thumped even faster, and my confidence rose. "The truth is that we have all been corrupted and gone away from God." He nodded. "We all are sinners, and our sin has determined our future. Hebrews 9:27 says, 'People are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment.'"

His mouth fell slightly open, and his hands relaxed.

"But the good news is that God has prepared a way out for every one of us through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross: 'For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.'" As I continued to talk with him, he appeared smaller and more peaceful.

Finally, he brought his hand to his forehead and said, "You are right. The people who sent me here are crazy. I do need Christ." He promised, "I will come to your church as a secret brother in Christ. I will worship your powerful God."

And with that, my killer walked away saved - a brother in Christ. He went on to enroll in seminary, and we have even kept in touch. He, like me, had found the Truth. And neither of us will be afraid to speak it ever again.

I encountered this as part of a larger story in an article, "I Found the Gospel in Communist Romania" (Christianity Today, September 23, 2016), by the same woman, Virginia Prodan. I have to admit, though, that the story sounds incredible, literally hard to believe. Why? The conversion seems too easy for a hardened killer. Something must have been ticking along within the man's heart - there must be a story waiting to be told, the killer's story, that would clarify the man's decision that night.

Christian Hype on Arabian Peninsula?

Arabian Peninsula
(In Green)
Wikipedia

Christianity Today reporter Jayson Casper, posting from the United Arab Emirates on September 11, 2015, offers some counter-intuitive news, and this headline says it all, right?

"Why Christianity Is Surging in the Heart of Islam"

Well, not quite all. A subtitle is needed:

"Medical missions and market dynamics lead to millions of believers in the Arabian Peninsula."

Readers would naturally infer that millions of Muslims in "the Heart of Islam," i.e., Saudi Arabia, are converting to Christianity, partly due to medical missions established by Christians. That, however, would be a hasty conclusion, for consider one Christian's remark about living in a Muslim country just next door to "the heart of Islam," but freer than Saudi Arabia, i.e., the United Arab Emirates (UAE):

"I don't feel fully free. You can definitely tell you are living in a Muslim country."

So . . . where are all these millions of Christians, and who are they?

[M]illions of foreign workers [are] transforming the former desert oasis into a global center for business and travel. The UAE's Dubai is the fifth-fastest-growing city in the world; its population is now more than 80 percent migrant . . . . [As for the Arabian Peninsula,] the Pew Research Center numbers Christians . . . at 2.3 million . . . . [and the] Gulf Christian Fellowship . . . estimates 3.5 million.

Neither of those numbers sounds particularly impressive. Notice also that the numbers are estimates dependent upon Christians migrating to the Arabian Peninsula for work, not due to Muslims converting to Christianity. Let's look even more closely at the numbers:

These migrants bring the UAE's Christian population to 13 percent, according to Pew. Among other Gulf states, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar are each about 14 percent Christian, while Oman is about 6 percent. Even Saudi Arabia, home to Islam's holiest cities (Mecca and Medina), is 4 percent Christian when migrants are counted.

These percentages also fail to impress. And there are restrictions:

[While in] Bahrain and Kuwait, Muslims can [at least] enter church compounds[, in] . . . Qatar, guards allow only foreigners.

And we already know that conversion from Islam to Christianity is a death sentence. As for the Christian migrants, ethnic cleansing could easily drive them out if Islamists were to have their way:

Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti (the nation's highest official of religious law) has called for all churches in the peninsula to be destroyed.

And he means in the other countries on the Arabian Peninsula, for Saudi Arabia already has no churches. Moreover, if there were mass conversions among Muslims anywhere on the Arabian Peninsula, the relative tolerance would change as fast as a smile can turn to a frown. Even the rest of the article, which tries to offer a feel-good report on the role of medical missions and global capitalism, admits the difficulties faced by Christians, but I'll leave all that for interested readers to peruse.

Phillip Jenkins on the end of Middle Eastern Christianity

Mosaic in Hagia Sophia
A Long-Lost Church

Baylor Magazine

Baylor professor Phillip Jenkins, adapting for Baylor Magazine (Winter 2015) an article originally published in Christianity Today, asks "Is this the end for Mideast Christianity?" I excerpt at length here from his answer:

For Christians in the Middle East, 2014 has been a catastrophe, . . . [though Iraqi Christians had] long believed they could maintain a foothold around Mosul, . . . [but] Islamist militants have controlled Mosul since June 10. Even if the total extermination of each and every believer is not the goal, those ancient communities and churches face the prospect of utter ruin . . .

The current battles are part of a lengthy story. Islam gained power over the Middle East in the seventh century, but . . . [Christians] retained . . . [a majority] for more than 500 years. Not until the 14th century did persecution become systematic and violent . . . [but even as] recently as 1914, Christians still made up 10 percent of the whole region from Egypt to Persia (Iran) . . .

Matters changed swiftly during World War I. Massacres and expulsions all but removed the once very large Armenian and Greek communities in Anatolia (now Turkey) . . . Emerging Arab nations also targeted Christians. Iraq's slaughter of Assyrians in 1933 gave lawyer Raphael Lemkin a basis upon which he defined the concept of genocide. The partition of Palestine and subsequent crises in the region massively shrunk other ancient Christian groups. The modern story of the Christian Middle East is one of contraction and collapse . . .

How bad could this get? All local Christians know the answer. They look back at the experience of Jews, who flourished across the region just a century ago but have now vanished from virtually every Mideast nation outside Israel . . . The only Christian community that seems secure is the Copts, perhaps eight million strong, and a solid majority in some of Egypt's southern districts. Even so, after the crisis there of the past two years, the potential remains for imminent civil conflict and Islamist violence . . .

More broadly, these events teach us about the long-term trajectories of Christian history. They show how churches vanish and, more important perhaps, how they survive under the direst of circumstances . . . One lesson emerges strongly: However often we talk of churches dying, they rarely do so without extraordinary external intervention. Churches don't die because their congregations age, their pastors behave scandalously, the range of programs they offer wears thin, or their theology becomes muddled. Churches vanish when they are deliberately and efficiently killed by a determined foe . . .

The Church of the East, the ancestor of the Assyrians and Chaldeans, perfectly illustrates that long survival - and profound current crisis. The disasters of the 14th century reduced that once transcontinental body to a much smaller remnant. That vestige continued within Iraq, Syria, and Anatolia for seven centuries. Throughout that latter period, hard-line Muslim jurists and demagogues competed to invent new humiliations to inflict on Christians: limits on what those believers could wear, the houses they could own, and the horses they could ride. At the worst of times, Christians wore rags to avoid giving any impression of wealth . . . If there was a single penalty that stung more than any, it was losing control of the soundscape. In a Muslim-ruled land, the only public voice of religion was the cry of the muezzin from the minaret; ringing church bells were utterly forbidden . . .

But Christians endured century through century. They maintained their faithful witness while recognizing their severe limits. Through bitter experience, they learned to identify the irreducible core of their faith while setting aside additional practices . . . Critically too, they could support monasteries where spiritual warriors maintained prayer and study. As long as monks prayed and priests said the liturgy, the church was intact, and that situation could last, in theory, until Judgment Day. Surviving monasteries tended to be in remote and highly defensible places, and their fortifications were formidable. Egypt still has such legendary fortresses of prayer, such as St. Antony's monastery and St. Catherine's in Sinai . . .

Some believers hoped that powerful Western churches would send aid, although foreign Protestants in particular could rarely grasp the distinct patterns of local religious practice . . . No less dangerous was the temptation to support secular nationalist parties that promised to govern regardless of faith or denomination. Such alliances were always something of a trap, as they intertwined local churches with dubious regimes, most notoriously the Ba'athists of Iraq or Syria . . .

The church persisted stubbornly until modern times, when new militants emerged to tear it up, root and branch. Believers were killed en masse, leaving survivors to flee the country for a time or altogether. Only at that point did churches cease to function . . . In the darkest years of the Middle Ages, when European Christians fled from barbarian invaders, their obvious refuge was the neighboring monastery. This past summer, that was exactly the course taken by the Christians of northern Iraq to escape the Islamic State . . . [R]emnants of Mosul's Christian community took shelter in the ancient cloisters of Mar Mattai. As the Islamic State has recently demonstrated, the practical logistics of destroying a church are not terribly difficult: You occupy a region militarily, and kill or expel all its inhabitants who practice the offending faith . . .

Over the past thousand years, Christians have repeatedly had to ask: Why would God allow his followers to suffer defeat, subjection, exile, and enslavement? They find some answers in biblical precedent, looking to the Hebrew prophets who saw their own kingdom defeated for lacking faith and betraying the national covenant. Seen in this light, even the worst disasters can be seen as God’s scourge on his sinful people . . . But deeply embedded in . . . Christian thought is the idea of the righteous remnant, the community that survives tribulations only to follow God's commands still more exactly. Perhaps the exile that initially seems a nightmare might form part of this greater plan, as dispossessed believers carry their witness to other lands. You cannot read the Bible without realizing how the Exile and Diaspora experience could powerfully spread faith into distant corners of the world . . .

Far more challenging is the question of why God would permit Christianity in a particular land to vanish altogether. Yes, churches move to new pastures where they might prosper. But what about their homelands? What about churches that are altogether destroyed, no remnant remaining? . . . God may seem silent on occasion. At other times, people simply don't trouble to hear his voice. Those previous cases of church extinctions are dreadful enough, but rarely are they as total as they initially appear . . .

What to us may seem like a definitive act of annihilation seems quite different when located upon a divine timescale. As we are often told, extinction is forever; but humans should be very cautious about using the language of eternity . . . As an example, we might look at the experience of China, which over the past two millennia has remained the world's most populous nation. The story of Chinese Christianity is a recurrent cycle of mighty boom years followed by what seemed like total annihilation at the time, an obliteration so absolute that on each occasion, it was quite clear that the church could never rise again. That cycle has occurred five times to date since the ninth century. On each occasion, the Chinese church has reemerged far more powerful than at its previous peak. Each successive "nevermore" proved to be strictly temporary . . .

Even when institutional churches vanish, believers persist in many different forms. One of the most understudied facts in Christian history is that of crypto-believers, those hidden remnants who hold on to truth while superficially accepting the prevailing regime. As Anatoly Lunacharsky, the frustrated Soviet minister of education, complained in 1928, "Religion is like a nail: The harder you hit it, the deeper it goes into the wood" . . . In Japan, for instance, the brutal destruction of the Catholic Church . . . did not prevent large groups of Kakure Kirishitan ("Hidden Christians") from maintaining the faith underground. In fact, some survived four centuries and a few elderly hang on today. We see the same phenomenon in China and, most relevant to this article, all across the Middle East. In Syria, estimates of the size of the Christian population before the present crisis commonly varied between 5 and 15 percent, with crypto-Christians accounting for much of the difference. Underground belief and practice will be much more difficult under an extreme Islamist regime than under the secular Ba'athists, but "cryptos" have often endured for astonishingly long periods, until gentler times return . . .

Even at this worst of times, Christians survive. But dare we say that, even in an increasingly intolerant Middle East, Christians as a whole are not just remaining but in places actually [growing]? . . . This gets us into sensitive territory. Over the past decade, we have heard amazing claims about new Christian evangelization in Muslim countries, usually accompanied by incredible conversion statistics . . . [S]ome specific accounts are much more believable. David Garrison's recent book, A Wind in the House of Islam, describes the Christian appeal in diverse Muslim societies. Remarkably, Syria offers some of the most convincing examples of this trend. Garrison is a responsible and critical reporter. The problem, though, is that all such activity is clandestine, for fear of arousing persecution . . .

[L]et us adopt a sweeping skepticism and dismiss all such stories. Even so, we are still witnessing a striking upsurge of Christian numbers in some of the most unlikely settings, almost entirely as a result of immigration. Look at Saudi Arabia, a land of 28 million people where Islam is the only permitted religion. Consequently, official sources list the country as 100 percent Muslim, [but] . . . Saudi Arabia is only one of many Middle Eastern countries that have imported millions of poor foreigners to perform menial jobs over the years. Many of those immigrants are African and Asian Christians, including many Filipinos. As they do not officially exist as Christians, they have zero right to practice their faith, even in private. But exist they do. By some estimates, Saudi Arabia's Christian population is about 5 percent of the whole, perhaps 1.5 million . . .

Other Gulf nations are more honest about just how religiously diverse they have become. Christians - mainly guest workers - probably make up 7 percent of the population of the United Arab Emirates, and 10 percent of Bahrain or Kuwait. Those are nations where Christianity scarcely existed . . . No less surprising is Israel. Together with Palestine and the Occupied Territories, the State of Israel now includes thousands of adherents of ancient Christian denominations. Those older churches have fallen sharply in their numbers in the past half-century, but newer Christians have more than replaced them. There are thousands of Global South guest workers. Also, many Russian Christians invoked Jewish ancestry to enter Israel in the 1990s. Some were Orthodox Christians, others Baptists and Pentecostals. Israel’s Russian Christian community today is perhaps 80,000 . . . Israel and Palestine combined have a population of some 10 million, of whom perhaps 5 percent are Christians - Arab, Armenian, Russian, African, and Filipino. Together with the Arab Gulf, these are the region's new and growing centers of Christian belief and practice . . . Not for a second should such signs of growth distract our attention from the dreadful situation facing Christians elsewhere in the Middle East. Individuals are being murdered, raped, enslaved, and turned into refugees, and Western governments have no option but to intervene on their behalf . . .

Armed intervention might actually succeed in crushing the most aggressive jihadi campaigns. In the longer term, Western churches undoubtedly have their role to play in assisting fellow believers, whether in their homelands or in their new diasporas. Even with vigorous activism, though, whether military or humanitarian, it is difficult to imagine the churches of Syria and Iraq returning to the flourishing condition they enjoyed . . . But that is quite different from saying that Christianity as such faces extinction in the region . . . In God's terms, words like strength and weakness can have surprising meanings. We must be very cautious indeed about making statements that claim to understand the goals or directions of history.

This is a theologically articulated article, one expressing hopes more than fears (since God is supposedly working his mysterious way behind the scenes), but I can't see Christian 'guest workers' on the Arabian peninsula having much impact on local Muslims, as I noted before in commenting on this article when it appeared in Christianity Today.

Myriam's Viral Video

Myriam and Family
with
SAT-7 Journalist
Essam Nagy
Christianity Today

A 10-year-old Christian Iraqi girl named Myriam fled her home in Mosul, Iraq along with her family for the security of Kurdistan's Irbil last July with hundreds of thousands of other Christians as the Islamic State (ISIS) surged into the city, and this little girl said some things that went viral on video after Essam Nagy of SAT-7 Kids interviewed Myriam and asked how she felt about those Islamists who drove her and her family from their home, she said:

"I will only ask God to forgive them. Why should they be killed?"

Her words of love to counter Islamist hate astonished nearly everyone who heard her speak, and - as already noted - the video went viral, becoming SAT-7's most-watched interview ever, having received over one million viewings at the time of the report that I read by Jayson Casper's, "Forgiving ISIS: Christian 'Resistance' Videos Go Viral in Arab World" (Christianity Today, March 17, 2015).

Professor Warren Larson on Islam: Violent or Peaceful?

Professor Emeritus Warren Larson
Columbia International University

Christianity Today editor-at-large Stan Guthrie interviewed Professor Emeritus Warren Larson in the Zwemer Center for Muslim Studies at Columbia International University to inquire about an evangelical Christian response to the question "Islam: Inherently Violent or Peaceful?" (Christianity Today, February 9, 2015):

How do we handle questions about the "true" nature of Islam and whether someone is a real Muslim?

There are no easy answers because of the complexity of Islam and divisions among Muslims as to what is true Islam and what is not. We need to find a balance between two extremes: (1) not to insist on the defiance of Charlie Hebdo and (2) not to simplistically say, "This is not Islam," . . . [for a] balanced position lies somewhere in between, but ultimately it is up to Muslims to decide who is a real Muslim. My sense is that many Muslims are going through some serious soul-searching at the moment . . . .

What is the best perspective for Christians? . . .

Muslims are broken and becoming more broken as the days go by. More will reject Islam . . . . Christians must be on the alert to reach out to them with love and understanding.

Some observers say that there are two Islams in the world today - one that is basically peaceful, another that is inherently violent.

Although there is an Islam with its rigid dogma, founded on canonical texts, I prefer to think of Muslims in their great variety with deep felt needs . . . . [Interestingly, most] Muslims in our world have a worldview that includes charms, amulets, curses, blessings, and a whole lot of fear. Of course, Islam is not a religion of peace, but is any human philosophy really peaceful? . . . [Moreover,] the way some Christians are acting toward Muslims today is not too peaceful, either. Most of us in the West couldn't care less what happens to Muslims - eternally - as long as we stay safe and Muslims behave. Let's have more hope . . . . My sense is that we are far too fearful, and many of us lack a sense of mission.

Some scholars believe "the law of abrogation" animates jihadists. They say if there is a contradiction between early, peaceful verses in the Qur'an and more brutal ones, the latter must hold sway because they were written later.

I do not think abrogation alone can explain bad behavior. Many reasonable Muslims reject the doctrine, and so I hesitate to tell them what they should believe. If a Muslim says to me, and some have, "My religion tells me to love and care for you," why should I say, "No, your religion tells you to hate and despise me"? . . . [Of course, the] Qur'an is convoluted, and if I were a Muslim, I also would be confused as to how to respond to Christians.

Professor Larson's solution to Islam's current-day aggressiveness is to encourage more mission work among Muslims, for - he thinks - many Muslims are going to abandon Islam in the near future, and the best thing to offer them is Christianity.

I suppose we'll see about that . . .

Religious Ambiguity of the Universe: Wolfhart Pannenberg's Death

Wolfhart Pannenberg
Christianity Today

Fred Sanders - writing a quasi-obituary for Christianity Today on "The Strange Legacy of Theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg" (September 18, 2014) - notes that:

For Pannenberg, God does not make himself known through speaking actual words, or through an interior, existential encounter, or in any other way. We know God because he makes himself known indirectly through historical events which are open to all observers, not just the eyes of faith.

This is an enigmatic position - i.e., that "God . . . makes himself known indirectly through historical events" - for historical events are known from imperfect records and their meaning depends, anyway, on inferences from those incomplete records. I understand this sort of theology as based on what I call "the theological ambiguity of the universe."

Everywhere we look - whether to the fine-tuning-of-the-universe design argument or to historical arguments for the resurrection - we find much ambiguity, such that judgment as to the existence of God could go either way, depending on the predilections of the individual.

I deal with this issue, albeit surreptitiously, in my novella, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer . . .

Rodney Stark: Statistics on Persecution of Christians

Rodney Stark

Image Borrowed from Brendon Vogt

In an interview by Daniel Philpott with Baylor sociologist of religion Rodney Stark on "Why the World Is Becoming More Violent" (Christianity Today, May 12, 2014), Stark disputes some figures I've also seen bandied about:

Much of what has been written about terrorism and the Middle East simply isn't true. There was the recent, widely publicized claim of 100,000 Christians a year dying for their faith. That's pretty stunning. When I found out how that 100,000 number was calculated, I realized it was absurd. More likely, the number was less than 7,000 a year.

As noted, I'd also heard the hundred-thousand figure claimed (though I learned it as a worldwide figure, not solely for the Middle East), and I had little reason to doubt it, until Stark challenged the statistic. He doesn't explain his reasons (those are in his book, I guess), but since he's generally pro-Christian, I think we can accept his figure. However, he also adds some disturbing news:

The most stunning finding: It had been widely reported by people who were looking at survey data that majorities throughout the Middle East disapproved of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Then I discovered something. The reason that overwhelming majorities disapproved is because they think it was a frame-up done by George W. Bush. Among those who accept that it was committed by Arab terrorists, most of them approve of the 9/11 attacks. That shocked me. Overwhelmingly, people approved to the extent that they rightly understood what happened on 9/11.

Stark wants to avoid attributing the increase in religious violence to an intrinsically violent Islam:

Religious violence isn't something new in the world. Lord knows there were 90 brands of Christianity all busy hating each other not long ago. Tolerance is hard to come by. I hesitate to think there is anything peculiar to the Islamic tradition. There is a problem, to be sure, in that Muhammad butchered people for their irreligion. But the fact is, Christians have killed each other by the millions too.

Yes, there is a problem, to put the case mildly, in that the moral exemplar for Muslims is Muhammad, much as the moral exemplar for Christians is Jesus . . .

Muslims Converting to Christianity?

Image: Courtesy, WIGTake Resources

Christianity Today

In "Why Muslims Are Becoming the Best Evangelists" (Christianity Today, April 22, 2014), Timothy C. Morgan interviews career missiologist David Garrison on Muslim conversions to Christianity:

Muslim background believers are leading Muslims to Christ in staggering numbers, but not in the West. They are doing this primarily in Muslim-majority nations almost completely under the radar -- of everyone . . . . "What did God use to bring you to faith in Jesus Christ? Tell me your story." This was the core question Garrison asked . . . . In Algeria, after 100,000 died in Muslim-on-Muslim violence, 10,000 Muslims turned their backs on Islam and were baptized as followers of Christ. This movement has tripled since the late 1990s . . . . Garrison estimates that 2 to 7 million people from a Muslim background worldwide now follow Christ . . . . [According to Garrison,] "Muslim-background believers [say] that they had met Jesus[,] . . . . people whose lives had been shaken and rattled by their encounter with Christ . . . . They look into their Koran and they see references to Jesus. In the Hadith, they hear stories about Jesus . . . . Abdul-Ahad, a Sheik from Mogadishu, Somalia . . . . had been involved in drug running, prostitution, and extortion . . . . [but] the Sheik was saved . . . . [and he] said, "You know when you see people like me with the beard and with the prayers, skull cap, you stay away from us because you're afraid of us . . . . The truth is we want you to be afraid of us . . . . But when you see people like me you need to know that we're empty and we're lost" . . . . [Garrison] often see[s that fear,] anger and hatred . . . . The sad thing is this fear is grounded in reality. You've got 14 centuries in which tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of Christians have been gobbled up into the world of Islam. It makes communism look like just a cheap parlor trick. Communism came and went in a century . . . . One reason Muslims are responding today is [their new situation]. They are in independent nations. They don't have colonial powers occupying them. As a result, they're turned in on themselves. They don't get along very well with one another. Several of the big movements . . . across the Muslim world coincide with Muslim-on-Muslim violence, horrible violence like in Algeria, Bangladesh, or Indonesia . . . . [as] self-government in Muslim-majority nations has triggered violence between Muslim factions . . . . Muslims are fighting Muslims both in the name of Allah, [but a]fter a while, people say: "Can this really be Allah's will? Can this really be his ideal for mankind? If this is Islam, I don't want any part of it" . . . . [For instance, i]n Afghanistan, one man who had been an imam said, "We were killing everybody in this village because they were a different branch of Islam than us. I took this little girl, one-and-a-half years old, in my arms. We had already killed her parents. She held my finger, looked me in the eye, as I stuck a knife into her and killed her. That was the beginning of my conversion [from Islam]" . . . . [As] for Christians[, says Garrison, t]his is not a time to . . . fear Muslims. This is a time to love, win, and reach Muslims . . . . [I]n the house of Islam, . . . [there are] movements breaking out in multiple places . . . . [One hears about Muslim dreams of Jesus, and Muslims take dreams very seriously.] It's part of the reality of their world. Mohammad listened to dreams, and he gave Muslims the impression that God could speak through them. So they do listen to them, and they do talk about them . . . . [Many of the Muslims interested in Jesus] are having dreams of a living being glowing with bright light and drawing persons to him or just exuding love or offering them a book to read . . . . [One evangelist would hear Muslims speaking of such dreams, and he would hand them a Bible, point to Matthew 17:1-2, and ask them to read.] They would start reading. "After six days Jesus took with him Peter, James and John the brother of James, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light" . . . . Muslims [would] read that and [say,] . . . . "That's the guy. That's the guy in my dreams. Who is this? And how do I know more about him?" . . . . A Muslim's direct encounter with the Bible seems crucial . . . . [Of these Muslim-background converts, t]here is a range [of views on Islam] . . . . Some Muslims who come to Christ and seem on the surface to be the most Islamic, hate Islam. They hate Mohammad. They would . . . [say]: "We will wipe this virus out from our people. It's just destroyed our people." And yet if you were an outsider, and you met them, you'd never even know they were a Christian, because they continue to live in the culture. And some of them are even imams and Sheiks who stayed in their culture. For many Muslims, Islam is central to the way their people function. It was their mother. It was their family. It was their community. And they had no [problem] . . . with Islam [as a culture]. What they want to do is to follow Jesus and to love their parents better and to draw them into faith. I found very few people who wanted to take on Islam. They just felt like that was a secondary battle. The real battle was to follow Jesus and to spread Jesus.

This is interesting, but even if we assume the high estimate of seven million Muslims converting every year from Islam to Christianity, that's a very low percentage out of one and a half billion Muslims, so I can't quite see much general impact, hardly the "staggering numbers" promised at the outset of this article . . .

Noaks Ark?

I happened yesterday to be reading Peter Chattaway's article "The Genesis of 'Noah'" (Christianity Today, March 27, 2014), which delves into film interpretations of the Noah story prior to the Aronofsky version currently showing, when I noticed this poster from publicity for the 1928 Hollywood version directed by the Hungarian director Michael Curtiz:

Something didn't look quite right, I thought, and after a puzzled minute or two, I realized the poster reads "Noaks Ark." I laughed at the mistake, but then wondered if it was a mistake. Googling "Noaks Ark," I found the following 'Nordic' poster written in Swedish:

Someone at Christianity Today found the same poster and clipped away the wording along the bottom but failed to notice that the poster reads "Noaks Ark," so I was still right about there being a mistake.

Actually, this Swedish version of the name in the film title is closer to the Hebrew (נֹחַ, Noach), whereas the English version follows the Greek Septuagint (Νωε, Noe), or perhaps the Latin Vulgate (Noe), so one could argue that "Noah" is the actual mistake.

I'd like to see this Aronofsky film . . . maybe also that 1928 version as well . . . and I now realize I ought to have worked in a Noah allusion in my novella, maybe in the "Cursed Canoe" passage . . .

Mark Galli on African-American Christianity

Plantation Burial
John Antrobus (1837-1907)
The Historic New Orleans Collection
The Bridgeman Art Library

The author Mark Galli has a fascinating account in an article for Christianity Today, "The Inconceivable Start of African-American Christianity" (February 21, 2014), on how African-American "slaves adopted their oppressor's religion -- and transformed it." He notes that very many slaveowners opposed the spread of Christianity among slaves, but under pressure from churches began to allow conversion, though only with teachings favorable to slaveowners:

The gospel presented to slaves by white owners, however, was only a partial gospel. The message of salvation by grace, the joy of faith, and the hope of heaven were all there, but many other teachings were missing.

House servants often sneered and laughed among themselves when summoned to family prayers because the master or mistress would read, "Servants obey your masters," but neglect passages that said, "Break every yoke and let the oppressed go free."

One white evangelist to slaves, John Dixon Long, admitted his frustration: "They hear ministers denouncing them for stealing the white man's grain, but as they never hear the white man denounced for holding them in bondage, pocketing their wages, or selling their wives and children to the brutal traders of the far South; they naturally suspect the Gospel to be a cheat and believe the preachers and slaveholder [are] in a conspiracy against them."

But many slaves were attracted to the emotional, experiential aspect of grace, faith, and the Spirit stressed by Methodists and Baptists, and as slaves converted to this style of Christianity, they found doctrinal implications that their white masters preferred to keep unspoken, so the slaves spoke about these implications, albeit among themselves only, and very quietly:

Lucretia Alexander explained that after enduring the white preacher's sermon ("Serve your masters. Don't steal your master's turkey . . . . Do whatsoever your master tells you do to"), her father would hold worship secretly in one of the slave quarters. "That would be when they would want a real meetin' with some real preachin' . . . . They used to sing their songs in a whisper and pray in a whisper."

To get a little distance between themselves and their masters, slaves would often meet in woods, gullies, ravines, and thickets, aptly called "hush harbors." Kalvin Woods recalled singing and praying with other slaves, huddled behind quilts and rags, hung "in the form of a little room" and wetted "to keep the sound of their voices from penetrating the air."

On one Louisiana plantation, slaves would steal off into the woods and "form a circle on their knees around the speaker, who would also be on his knees. He would bend forward and speak into or over a vessel of water to drown the sound. If anyone became animated and cried out, the others would quickly stop the noise by placing their hands over the offender's mouth."

But some grew bolder from what they found in their new faith:

Francis Henderson described her conversion this way: "I had recently joined the Methodist Church, and from the sermons I heard, I felt that God had made all men free and equal, and that I ought not be a slave -- but even then, that I ought not to be abused. From this time I was not punished. I think my master became afraid of me."

Such experiences as these clearly suggest the early origins of what is sometimes called Black Liberation Theology. Anyway, the article is, as I noted, fascinating and worth reading for understanding the African-American experience of life in a 'free' land . . .

C. S. Lewis: Converted Later than Believed?

Christianity Today

Jerry Root, associate director of the Billy Graham Center Institute of Strategic Evangelism at Wheaton College and an expert on Lewis, asks, "Does C. S. Lewis Have Something to Hide?" in a review of Alister McGrath's C. S. Lewis - A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet for Christianity Today (November 22, 2013). Root thinks not, but he does acknowledge this:

McGrath does uncover some information that's barely known even among Lewis scholars and aficionados. For example, Lewis's conversion to Christianity actually took place several months to a year later than the dates Lewis himself seems to suggest. The chronology of these events reveals how carefully McGrath pays attention to detail.

I noted this point on the Milton List -- Lewis was an expert on Milton's Paradise Lost -- and Professor Salwa Khoddam, another expert on Lewis, filled in the details:

What Alister McGrath in C. S. Lewis: Eccentric Genius. Reluctant Prophet--A Life writes is that Lewis came to believe in God in 1930 rather in 1929. But the famous conversation between him, Tolkien, and Dyson in Sept. 19, 1931 is still the pivoting event that drove the process of his conversion to Christianity, by his accepting the true "myth" of Christianiy. According to McGrath, this conversion process culminated not in what is traditionally taken to be the correct date of his belief in the divinity of Christ (28 Sept. 1931), during a trip to the Whipsnade Zoo in a motorbike driven by his brother Warnie, but in June 1932, while being driven to the Whipsnade Zoo in a car by Edward Foord-Kelcey. McGrath has interesting evidence to prove these new landmarks (135-59).

There it is, for all you Lewis fans: The Truth! Well, accuracy about dating, anyway . . .

Limits to Therapeutic Worldview?

Breaking Bad
Christianity Today

Back in the 1980s, in Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah examined the limits of what is at times called the "therapeutic worldview," namely, that view of human evil that imagines treating it in purely therapeutic terms, as though that evil were merely a pathology from which a person needs to be healed, with no moral judgment rendered.

Recently, I read a review of the television series Breaking Bad that shows how its creator, Vince Gilligan, also sees the limits of that view: David Zahl, "The Frightening -- But Biblical -- Moral Logic of 'Breaking Bad'" (Christianity Today, August 9, 2013):

Anguished after committing murder in cold blood, Walt's long-suffering former-student-turned-accomplice Jesse Pinkman attends a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in hopes of finding relief. After Jesse shares a thinly veiled version of his own crime, the group leader counsels self-acceptance. "We're not here to sit in judgment," he says, to which Jesse explodes:

Why not? Why not? . . . If you just do stuff and nothing happens, what's it all mean? What's the point? . . . So no matter what I do, hooray for me because I'm a great guy? It's all good? No matter how many dogs I kill, I just -- what, do an inventory, and accept?

Jesse rejects a world in which his transgression garners no consequence or cost. He seems to know that clemency must have some basis, that as much as we might wish it were so, absolution cannot be conjured out of thin air, at least not if it is going to address a truly guilty conscience.

Zahl, as might be expected, has the answer in his review for Jesse's dilemma, but he's not too heavy-handed about that answer, and the review itself has merit.

Full disclosure: I've never watched even a YouTube clip of Breaking Bad . . .

Christian-Muslim Syncretism . . . or Inchoate Orthodoxy?

Insider Movements

Christianity Today

The magazine Christianity Today offers several interesting articles on Christian movements among Muslims, the most recent being "Discipleship Is Messy" (January 17, 2013), which among other things expresses the following, somewhat paradoxical pair of evangelical positions:

[M]any new converts and missiologists say that new converts from Islam or Hinduism, for example, should repudiate their religion, and even their culture, especially if that religion has permeated culture to prevent people from hearing the gospel. There is something right and true about this approach for many believers.

Other converts and missiologists encourage new believers to remain in their culture as long as possible, as long as Scripture doesn't explicitly forbid the practices in question. This approach has been very effective at introducing Muslims to Christ, exponentially even, as the article by missiologist Phil Parshall shows. There is also something right and true about this approach.

I find interesting the various perspectives even within Evangelicalism as it confronts the challenges of a diverse but interconnected global world of religions, as these two diametrically opposite views demonstrate, for oddly enough, Christianity Today affirms both of them. The choice of one or the other approach perhaps depends on the context, too, not only upon the distinction made above but, for example, on whether the Islamic community is governed by sharia or not, for apostasy from Islam is a capital offense according to Islamic law, so openly repudiating Islam would automatically invite a death sentence in such a context, leaving no space for the growth of a Christian community. For the other articles, in contra-sequential order, see:

"How Much Muslim Context Is Too Much for the Gospel?" Phil Parshall (January 16, 2013)

"Why Evangelicals Should Be Thankful for Muslim Insiders," John J. Travis (January 15, 2013)

"The Hidden History of Insider Movements," Timothy C. Tennant (January 14, 2013)

"Worshiping Jesus in the Mosque," Gene Daniels (January 14, 2013)

These are the five articles about the growth of Christianity among Muslims, a growth no larger than a mustard seed that's scarcely sprouted.

We'll see if it gets nipped in the bud . . .

Why The Youthful Turn From Religion?

God and Politics
Illustration by Gluekit
Joshua Ets-Hokin / Getty Images
Russell Tate / Getty Images
Newsweek

This week's Newsweek presents an article by David Sessions on "The GOP's Secularism Problem" (Oct 15, 2012):

The latest sign came in a Pew study released last week that found that one in five American adults now claims no religion, and that 34 percent of those younger than 30 consider themselves irreligious.

What's the Republican Party got to do with this?

The GOP's own base may be partly to blame. The data echoes a landmark 2010 study, American Grace, by political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell, which linked the new chilliness toward organized religion to the rise of the religious right. Other recent studies bear out their hypothesis: in March, Pew found that a majority of the electorate, including nearly half of Republicans, is uncomfortable with the amount of religious talk in political campaigns.

Not all Republicans like religion in politics, then, and the shift is linked to the battle over homosexuality in the culture war:

The shift away from religion is especially pronounced among those younger than 30, who began abandoning churches in greater numbers at exactly the moment conservative Christians made gay marriage their signature issue.

As I implied in a couple of previous blog entries, whereas the older generation of evangelicals sees homosexuality as a moral issue, the younger generation sees it as a human rights issue. Even Christianity Today has begun to recognize the crisis, for in "The Love We Dare Not Ignore," a book review of Justin Lee's Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs.-Christians Debate (Jericho Books, 2012), Wesley Hill insists:

It's a profound mistake to neglect our gay brothers and sisters in the body of Christ.

Justin Lee is a gay evangelical, and as one might well have guessed, Wesley Hill himself has come out:

Full disclosure: I am a celibate gay Christian. Like Lee, I grew up Southern Baptist. Like him, I discovered during puberty that I was exclusively attracted to others of my own sex.

These two gay evangelical Christians differ over the issue of celibacy, but both argue that Christians need to change their attitude toward homosexuals, and note well, these two are those of the younger generation who don't turn to secularism!

The issue isn't just about homosexuality, of course, but the larger tendency on the political right to mix religion with politics in an attempt to force people to be "moral," As the Newsweek article notes concerning the increasing secularization of America, "Some evangelicals are openly worried about the trend," and it cites "the late Chuck Colson, a religious-right leader, [who] said [shortly] before his death":

"We made a big mistake in the '80s by politicizing the gospel . . . . Now people are realizing it was kind of a mistake."

I vividly recall the so-called "Moral Majority" of the early 1980s, some of whose more unrealistic members wanted the federal government to pass laws against adultery and use police to enforce such laws! Neither they nor the evangelical right got all that they wanted, but they did succeed in re-branding Evangelicalism, which had previously emphasized persuasion, into a force that promised coercion.

Iranian theocrats found that the mixing of coercive religion and politics turned people against Islam, and something similar may be happening with Christianity in the US for mixing religion and politics.

Iranian Refugees' Interest in Christianity

Iranian Converts

Photo by Kairospress

Christianity Today

An extremely interesting article by Matthias Pankau and Uwe Siemon-Netto, "The Other Iranian Revolution," appeared in Christianity Today (7/17/2012), reporting on Christian converts among Iranian refugees living in Germany:

[Apparently, there are] countless reports of Muslims having visions of Jesus. According to . . . [those] interviewed for this article, most of these appearances follow a pattern reported by converts throughout the Islamic world: Muslims see a figure of light, sometimes bearing the features of Christ, sometimes not. But they instantly know who he is. He always makes it clear that he is Jesus of the Bible, not Isa of the Qur'an, and he directs them to specific pastors, priests, congregations, or house churches, where they later hear the gospel.

How did these conversions get started?

Twelve years ago, Trinity Parish in Leipzig, a tiny congregation of the Independent Lutheran Church, began teaching German as a second language to asylum seekers awaiting government approval of their refugee status.

Trinity used Luther's Bible translation as a textbook. Linguists credit that translation with having created the modern German language. Intrigued by what they read, several exiles asked to be baptized. They brought along friends who also wished to learn the basics of the Christian faith. "Today, one third of our 150 members are Persians," says Markus Fischer, Trinity's pastor.

That's the story in Germany, anyway, but there's a broader answer, for Iranians have been converting to Christianity since the 1980s, repelled by Iran's Shi'ite Islamist government, with its system of enforced Islamic law, and attracted by Christianity, with its emphasis upon grace rather than law. Or as one German pastor explains:

"Islam is like a rope ladder on which people try to reach God . . . . They manage to climb a few rungs, but with each sin, fall off the ladder and must start all over again. Christians, by contrast, need no ladder because Jesus comes down to earth for them. Christians have salvation. Muslims don't."

Also, Iranian refugees tend to be well-educated, and among educated Iranians, Islam has lost a lot of moral legitimacy due to Iran's theocratic system, or so the article says. But I would add two more things. Shi'ite Islam in some forms speaks of a divine spark or divine light within the early caliph they honor, Ali, so the Christian concept of Jesus as both human and divine is not so foreign, and Ali's suffering at his death -- betrayed and dying of thirst -- can recall the death of Jesus. But religious concepts aside, Iranians are very proud of their pre-Islamic civilization and don't accept the Islamic view that everything pre-Islamic was mere ignorance, what Muslims call jahiliyya, a very negative expression. Iranians tend to see Islam as an Arab ideology and Islamization as Arabization, and I think there's merit to their opinion.

Whatever the motivation, these conversions are certainly a phenomenon to keep one's eyes on in the shifting kaleidoscope of contemporary European multiculturalism.

Coptic Christians: Another Egyptian Story . . .

Coptic Christians

Christianity Today

One of the free, unsolicited magazines that I receive access to via regular emails is Christianity Today, and it often provides me with a different perspective on the news, as in Egypt, for instance, where it seeks out a Christian perspective on recent changes dominated by Muslims and tending toward Islamism in a manner alarming to many Egyptian Christians, as reported in this article by Jeremy Weber, "The Fight for Egypt's Future: Coptic Christians test new strategies to thrive in an Islamist Egypt" (May 31, 2012):

Are Christians fleeing Egypt? Some, yes. Nearly every church can name a family that has emigrated. Many more families desire to follow suit but cannot.

But the closer one looks, an irony emerges. Coptic leaders report that a significant number of Christians, especially in rural or poor communities, do fear the future. But many of the most ardently Christian -- former Muslims who now follow Christ and have the most to lose under an Islamist government -- are the most eager to stay. They hold to their love of country -- and to their belief in God's promise in Isaiah 19: "Blessed be Egypt my people."

One case study is a Muslim-background believer turned human-rights activist who fancies himself the Christian version of Che Guevara. Bleary-eyed from demonstrating in Tahrir until 2 A.M. the night before, he is realistic about the increasing risks facing converts as Islamists gain political power.

"We [converts] could be the first people to be killed," said the activist, who asked for anonymity. "We are the rust in Islam that is corroding the walls. We are the threat."

But rather than seeking the first opportunity to leave Egypt, he and others like him choose to stay and exert influence behind the scenes. "Doctors stay in medicine; politicians stay in politics; advocates stay in advocacy," he said. "The salt put in warehouses will just go stale. The salt needs to be in the food."

Thus "Che" sees a silver lining in Egypt's lack of progress to equalize conversion laws. "Maybe God meant that our ID cards were not permitted to change because we can never be forced to leave -- our IDs say Muslim not Christian," he said. "I believe this is the grace of God. I would be feeling sorry if I had changed my ID; I would have lost many opportunities [for influence]."

The point about ID cards is that the government issues ID cards that designate each individual's religion. Muslims who convert to Christianity have found that changing their IDs to identify themselves as Christians is almost impossible. Such Muslim-background Christians are easy to identify as originally Muslim, and Islamists would consider such converts to be apostates from Islam deserving death according to Islamic law. The convert who calls himself "Che" treats the problem as an opportunity for witness, namely, a chance for converting Muslims to Christianity by explaining to them his own conversion from Islam. Other witness opportunities have been less a chance than a tragedy:

Copts have also earned newfound respect at street level. Mina Daniel, an Orthodox youth killed during last October's Maspero Massacre, has become an iconic figure among revolutionary youth. More than 25 Copts died in front of the state TV station as they protested church burnings. Many who died were killed after military vehicles ran over them. "Mina Daniel" is chanted during street protests, and red flags bear his likeness. "I never thought I could love a Christian guy," says a Salafi activist in a YouTube video. "[But] I learned that not only Muslims are ready to die for their country."

That puts a good face on an unhappy event, but it undoubtedly has significance, given that a Salafi expresses something good about a Christian, despite the irony that Salafis -- the most hardline of the Islamists -- are likely the very ones who instigated the burning of churches. But I see no reason to doubt the words of this particular Salafi activist, for Mina Daniel's death under the wheels of an army truck touched even Muslims who would previously have cursed Christians. Similarly, personal interactions of Christians and Muslims in the medical field have touched Muslims:

The church's field hospital is not only the revolution's largest; it also serves as a powerful symbol of unity, with evangelical and Orthodox doctors working alongside Salafi and Muslim Brotherhood colleagues. "This changes [Muslims'] minds as to what a church is," said [evangelist Fawzi] Khalil. "They see that Christian people are good. We smile. We are human."

A Muslim ophthalmologist volunteering at the field hospital explained how she had seen dozens of patients with ruptured eyes, instead of her usual one per week. "These patients need psychological care, but we doctors need psychological care too," she says. "We are traumatized. I feel we are here not only to take care of the patients, but to take care of each other." A nearby pastor offers to pray with her. She is shocked but assents, and starts to cry through her red-rimmed glasses.

Such responses as those of the Salafi Muslim man and this Muslim woman doctor are strong and very personal, and they are positive signs amidst the darkness of hatred also expressed toward Christians, but I wonder how significant these 'signs' are in the larger picture.

I guess we'll find out . . .

Paul Simon's 'Christian' Interests?

Paul Simon

Christianity Today

As someone who hangs around with the evangelical crowd, though mainly on the sidelines, I've often encountered references to the late British evangelical John Stott, so I was curious to read that one of my favorite musicians, Paul Simon, had liked the man. We learn this from Kim Lawton, of the PBS program Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly, who has written on the point in "Paul Simon: 'God Comes Up a Lot in My Songs'" for Christianity Today (January 9, 2012), which tells of Simon's "memorable conversation with John Stott":

Simon said he was recording in England when he saw a 2004 New York Times column by David Brooks, which described Stott's approach to faith.

"The piece was about how embarrassed some Christians were by the televangelists, and (it) said, no one ever talks about this guy, but he's a really good thinker," Simon said.

Paul Simon reads David Brooks? David Brooks reads John Stott? Maybe we should take a look at that column, which asks, "Who is John Stott?" (New York Times, November 30, 2004), and then offers an answer:

[I]f evangelicals could elect a pope, Stott is the person they would likely choose. He was the framer of the Lausanne Covenant, a crucial organizing document for modern evangelicalism. He is the author of more than 40 books, which have been translated into over 72 languages and have sold in the millions. Now rector emeritus at All Souls, Langham Place, in London, he has traveled the world preaching and teaching.

When you read Stott, you encounter first a tone of voice . . . . It is a voice that is friendly, courteous and natural. It is humble and self-critical, but also confident, joyful and optimistic. Stott's mission is to pierce through all the encrustations and share direct contact with Jesus. Stott says that the central message of the gospel is not the teachings of Jesus, but Jesus himself, the human/divine figure. He is always bringing people back to the concrete reality of Jesus' life and sacrifice.

There's been a lot of twaddle written recently about the supposed opposition between faith and reason. To read Stott is to see someone practicing "thoughtful allegiance" to scripture. For him, Christianity means probing the mysteries of Christ. He is always exploring paradoxes. Jesus teaches humility, so why does he talk about himself so much? What does it mean to gain power through weakness, or freedom through obedience? In many cases the truth is not found in the middle of apparent opposites, but on both extremes simultaneously.

Stott is so embracing it's always a bit of a shock -- especially if you're a Jew like me -- when you come across something on which he will not compromise . . . . Most important, he does not believe truth is plural. He does not believe in relativizing good and evil or that all faiths are independently valid, or that truth is something humans are working toward. Instead, Truth has been revealed. As he writes:

"It is not because we are ultra-conservative, or obscurantist, or reactionary or the other horrid things which we are sometimes said to be. It is rather because we love Jesus Christ, and because we are determined, God helping us, to bear witness to his unique glory and absolute sufficiency. In Christ and in the biblical witness to Christ God's revelation is complete; to add any words of our own to his finished work is derogatory to Christ."

Yeah, that's pretty uncompromising. I wonder why Paul Simon, who is also Jewish, expressed a wish to meet the man, though he apparently did, as Lawton tells us:

He decided he wanted to meet Stott, and a friend helped connect them. Simon called the theologian and offered to take him out for dinner. He said Stott told him he didn't go out much anymore and instead invited the musician to his flat for tea and biscuits.

"I'd say we spent two or three hours there," Simon recalled. "I talked about everything that was on my mind about things that seemed illogical, and he talked about why he had come to his conclusions."

Simon was very impressed by Stott. "I liked him immensely," he told me. "I left there feeling that I had a greater understanding of where belief comes from when it doesn't have an agenda."

"It didn't change my way of thinking," he added, "but what I liked about it was that we were able to talk and have a dialogue."

I guess Simon just wanted to understand evangelicals and have some of his questions answered by a thoughtful evangelical leader who is also a well-informed intellectual.

You can watch Kim Lawton's interview, "Paul Simon" (January 6, 2012), on her Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly program for PBS. He says less there than Lawton provides for us on the Christianity Today site, but there are other interesting things, such as the character of his most recent album, So Beautiful or So What, which the evangelical Irish blogger Cathleen Falsani, "who writes frequently about religion and pop culture," praised as "one of the most memorable collections of spiritual musical musings in recent memory." In citing Falsani, Lawton is quoting from an article that Falsani wrote for The Huffington Post, "So Beautiful or So What So Christian?" (June 30, 2011). In that article, Falsani also cites Steve Stockman, "a Protestant clergyman and music critic from Northern Ireland," who says that Simon's album is perhaps "the best Christian album of the year."

As a follow-up to that piece and the Lawton interview, Falsani tells in "God, PBS and Paul Simon, The 'God Chronicler By Accident'" (Sojourners, January 6, 2012) of a burgeoning friendship with Simon, who had read her article. Of Simon, she writes:

Simon is the real deal. He is thoughtful, kind and intellectually curious. He pulls no punches, digs deeper, seeking the truth -- whatever it may be.

He sounds like an interesting man, as I would have expected from his music -- which I started listening to when I was about 10 -- and today's blog post has been interesting for me to write, for it was unplanned and has taken me places that I didn't expect to go.

I hope that readers have enjoyed the journey . . .

Christopher Hitchens: Requiescat In Pace

Christopher Hitchens

(13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011)

Wikipedia

Christopher Hitchens has died of pneumonia, a complication of his throat cancer treatment, and I take this moment to offer my respects. I enjoyed reading his views as he expressed them, not because I always agreed but because he expressed himself so well, with such style, verve, nerve, and flair. Martin Kramer observes that "[t]here was much to admire and dislike about the late Christopher Hitchens," and I am put in mind of a stanza from Auden's poem "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," his tribute to that poet upon learning of his passing:

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

Curious what his enemies might have to say about him, I went to Christianity Today to read the tribute there by Douglas Wilson, who had debated Hitchens in 2007 on the question "Is Christianity Good for the World?" Wilson had these kind words for the man:

He was actually an affable and pleasant dinner companion, and fully capable of being the perfect gentleman. He was fully aware of the authority an enfant terrible could have, provided he played his cards right, and this was a strategy that Hitchens employed very well indeed. One man who delivers a terrible insult is banned from television for life, and another man, who does the same thing, has people lining up with invitations and microphones. In case anyone is wondering, Christopher was that second man.

I found Wilson's parting words rather gracious as well:

We therefore commend Christopher to the Judge of the whole earth, who will certainly do right. Christopher Eric Hitchens (1949-2011). R.I.P.

"Well, I say amen to that, sir," though in my pride and my prejudice, perhaps with a touch of sincere irony . . .

Heather Mercer on Personalizing Relations with Muslims

Heather Mercer with Kurdish Woman

(Image from Christianity Today)

Ten years ago, Heather Mercer and Dayna Curry were Christian social workers assisting Afghans through Shelter Now, a housing outreach organization, and had been arrested by the Taliban, ostensibly for proselytizing among Muslims. The charges were probably accurate, in a general sense -- though the two did not explicitly attempt to convert Muslims -- for they believed that living for Christ would draw Muslims to Jesus. Both Heather and Dayna were threatened with capital punishment, but I had the impression from the news reports that the Taliban weren't sure what to do with them. Eventually, they were rescued by anti-Taliban forces as Nato's intervention overthrew the Islamist government in the aftermath to 9/11.

According to Timothy C. Morgan, "How Heather Mercer's Hostage Stint Turned into Global Hope," Christianity Today (September 12, 2011), Heather relocated to Iraqi Kurdistan in 2003 and has continued relief work among Muslims. Her experiences seem to indicate that despite the clash of civilizations, cordial relations can be forged across cultural fault lines. Individual Muslims seem to respond well to personalized religious overtures, as we see from the following interview conducted by Morgan:

What can American Christians do to better understand Muslims?

Muslims are people just like us. They have the same desires, the same ambitions. They want to raise their family to be healthy, happy, and whole. The first point is bringing a human face to Muslims. Many Muslims are god-fearing people. They believe in a monotheistic God. They want to experience the promise of eternal life. But they have been handed a religious system and tradition that does not allow them to know the God we know.

Muslims come to know Christ through an authentic relationship with a follower of Jesus, through reading the Scripture in their language, and through having a personal encounter with Christ -- through a dream, or a vision, or through supernatural healing.

Evangelicals in this country can take their experience with Christ and share that with their Muslim neighbors. For the most part, Muslims are very open to that. They love relationship; everything rides on the spirit of hospitality. They love prayer. Engage them on those levels.

Do you believe that relations between Christians and Muslims are improving?

I don't think we're as far as we need to be. There are 1 billion Muslims around the world and 88 percent of them have never met a follower of Jesus. The church needs to rise up with love and humility, and have a willingness to lay its life down for the Muslim world.

Where should a Christian leader start?

It can feel very intimidating. Start a conversation with a Muslim. Find out what they believe. Talk to them. Understand their life. Ask questions. Try to understand their worldview. Get training. In this country, helping to train the American church to reach Muslim neighbors is an organization called Crescent Project.

Another step is pray like crazy. Start a prayer ministry at the church praying for the Islamic world. Visit the local imam and ask him for dialogue. I've never once had a Muslim deny prayer in the name of Jesus. I always ask them, "May I pray for you in Jesus' name?" I want them to know who it is I worship. It's not an easy assignment. But it's a worthy one. If God can use a 20-year-old, blonde, blue eyed, single American girl then he can use anybody.

Heather is no longer just 20, of course. A decade has passed, and she has undoubtedly learned a great deal since 2001. What I find interesting about her remarks is the statement that Muslims "love relationship; everything rides on the spirit of hospitality." That suggests to me that everything is personalized for Muslims. They take nearly everything personally, which might also explain their tendency to easily take offense at perceived slights. Or at real insults.

This tendency toward offense, the personalized coin's other side, doesn't work well in the West, where many Muslims are migrating these days -- that old clash of civilizations again -- for the West is largely based not on personal relations but on rational-legal ones. Evangelicals, however, offer friendship and helpful assistance based on relationships patterned after the personal relationship that they believe themselves to have with Jesus, and they offer Muslims the possibility of enjoying this same divine relationship. Muslims often find that combination irresistable.

I, too, have found Muslims to be very friendly on a personal level, though I've also learned that I have to be careful in what I say, for their honor compels them to an affronted defense of Islam, especially among Arab Muslims.

Heather's emphasis upon friendship with Muslims is a significant insight, but the West expects more of individuals than personalized relations, and a rational-legal system can't work without ignoring personal connections, so the larger problem remains.

Heather and Dayna, by the way, are Baylor alumni, which partly explains my interest in their story.