Thoughts from Udo:

Comments about declining church attendance in Europe.

April 20, 2011

Declining church attendance in most European countries is no clear evidence for reduced appreciation of Christianity. Nor is it an obvious indication that people turn to other faiths or abstain completely. While Sunday services are generally poorly attended, free concerts in church buildings on Sunday afternoons are highly prized and attract an interested audience across all age groups. On almost any Sunday during the winter months two to five concerts are offered nearby.
The first may be due to taking Sunday literally as a day of rest not to be interrupted by a scheduled service. More likely it has something to do with the diluted content from Scripture. A focus on inner illumination, spiritual feelings, and orientation to something other than daily obligations can also be achieved by hiking in the mountains, watching the wind curl ripples on the surface of the lake, or enjoying the larger family on walks and at play.
The second is unsurprising and satisfying. It reflects the power to communicate a specific Christian content in the context of the church buildings. Even if the words of sermons have been robbed of their meaning, the building, the stained glass windows, the presence of an open Bible refresh the knowledge of Christianity in the minds of people.
Compulsory religious education in public schools has given everyone a basic knowledge of Moses, the Prophets, and Jesus Christ. Visual reminders of the truth surrounding these personages are not only found in church architecture (where the events portrayed in the windows are once again teaching tools of biblical content), but also in civic life enormously influenced and widely colored by centuries of Christian teaching. Respect for others, tolerance, civil arguments, a solid work ethic, social responsibilities taken seriously, and a good educational grounding in schools result from a biblical view of life and people.
A concert on a recent Sunday was in the church of La Tour-de-Peilz near Vevey, Switzerland, built on the foundations of an earlier 12th century church building, with its simple white walls, light gray tuft stone choir section, a balcony all around for additional seating. The table with an open Bible (replacing the altar after the Reformation), the cross suspended from the ceiling, the chancel for the exposition of the Word, and the dry vine roots in a bed of gravel as floral arrangement—all speak of and give visual substance to one reality: the truth of the Bible’s message.
The choir, accompanied by a single piano, gave verbal content to the setting, leading the people to comprehension and worship. Among much else, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Easter Song” has these words:
Rise heart; thy Lord is risen.
Sing his praise without delays,
Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise
With him may’st rise;
That, as his death calcined thee to dust,
His life may make thee gold, and much more, Just.
His “Love Bade Me Welcome” used a variation of a familiar Reformation choral theme, known to almost everyone, to tell us:
Truth, Lord; but I have marr’d them:
Let my shame go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love; who bore the blame?
My deare, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat.
So I did sit and eat.
The understanding and acceptance of the basic biblical message is not expressed in the demonstrative and personal forms we may expect and look for, but it is rooted deeply in the perception and faith and life habits of this intergenerational audience. Church attendance and commitment as evidence of belief is less frequent than a deep confidence in the truth of the message of the Bible . . . when it has not been outright rejected and replaced by a more personal religion and frequent preference for Buddhist prayer flags. Here the failure of an intellectual engagement of the population by the church brings in a tragic harvest.

Comments about "Crossing The Tiber" by Udo

August 2, 2010

Dear friends,

The article “Evangelicals crossing the Tiber to Catholicism” in Religious Dispatches (August 2, 2010) (http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/atheologies/2731/) has received some attention. For me, this is not only interesting because of the mention of the college I teach at or the stories of some of dear students, whom I have learnt to appreciate and respect.

“Crossing the Tiber” describes a phenomenon from a mixture of personal inquiry and frustration and a longing for something ‘more true’, intimate, personal and spiritual that repeats itself often in the history of the church, but also in our open, self-correcting and “protesting” culture. Rather than bathed in traditionalism and authoritative repetition, both our own dissatisfaction with what Scripture describes as a fallen world (where we are not “at home”) and with ourselves as imperfect cause us to long for something more, possibly elsewhere, possibly in some other dimension.

I see it as the quest for perfection, intimacy, the ideal, which Scripture tells us will be realized at the return of Christ, but not before. The lure in ideologies has been the offer of perfection now. Utopians have held out what is both ‘no place’ and ‘good place’ = ‘eutopia’. Religions, including parts of classical RC and Evangelicalism, have often offered that integration in their system, their community, their historical claims, their artistic demonstration (After all Baroque came out of a reaction to the Reformation’s emphasis on God’s word and peace with God through faith in Christ, and sought to portray the richness, splendor and heavenly presence already now in architecture and painting in the RC churches). Prior to that, the celebration of the mystery of the Eucharist drew believers equally much to awe from the common, material, earthly place. Yet the earthly place and in our bodies is where we live as God intended, and where Christ came “down to earth”, as later the heavenly Jerusalem will come “down to earth”.

The exposition of the Word and its application was a Reformation emphasis; there was almost no preaching in earlier times since the High Middle Ages in what then became the RC church. Only when preaching drew greater crowds and gave greater wonder and peace than the Eucharistic mystery did the RC church also start to give sermons instead of reciting the lives of the saints. The Protestant church, as well as the ‘one catholic church’ before somewhere around the 10th century, understood God’s relation to us through the WORD, written and in the flesh, by which we shall live more than “by bread alone.”

That bread satisfies appetites, sensations, feelings. The WORD satisfies the mind and soul and gives direction to work and to practice society. For that reason Jesus did not feed the 5000 when they came back to be fed a second time. He told them instead to believe the true bread that came from heaven.

We find reactions from a desire for something ‘more’ were also the root of romanticism against industrialization; ‘Sturm und Drang’ against authoritarian governments; Mozart’s music against the dictates of the church, the hippy culture against the bourgeois parents; the Jesus movement against staid theology; Bill Gothard’s “Basic Youth Conflict” against the loss of parental control in the revolutionary times of the 1960s and ‘70s; the private focus, vows of poverty (past and more recently), search for mystery and self-analytical repentance movements rose against sound rationality, unequal wealth, captivating scientific reductionism and evident injustice around the world.

Common is always the search for perfection here and now, but with a twist: While Utopians propose perfection for all of life, the whole community, the search is now for a more personal perfection through an attachment to a historical myth of one true church and aesthetic sensation.

Thomas Howard (brother of Elizabeth Elliot) converted for among other reasons because the communion elements were not held high enough in his Episcopal church. My brother-in-law converted because “Evangelicals invent their theology as they go along. I want certainty from historical continuity, aesthetic integration and effort. RC has one pope; we know the error in its teaching. Evangelicals have a thousand popes whom people follow obediently, and there is no way to know what is right and wrong.”

Scripture suggests that there has never been the perfect church: why else where disciples called “oh ye of little faith” and why else were so many letters written to churches in trouble? They were mostly efforts to correct weird, false views, not uncommon from what we may find here and there.

Scripture shows that perfection is not within reach now. We wait, believing, struggling, comparing and in prayer for our own faithfulness to God’s word and Spirit. We hunger and thirst, and these will not be fully quenched until Christ walks down the street and announces the fullness of his Kingdom.

In the meantime we do well to show that there is no perfect church, no perfection within reach in any area. For that reason we favor and benefit from democracy, market access, the rule of law, the review of all things: rooted ultimately in the encouragement from Scripture to argue with God for the sake of heaven. (That is a combination of titles from two wonderful books – Arguing with God and Arguments for the Sake of Heaven - by Jewish authors, among them Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of GB, quoted often in the Financial Times!!). Job, Jeremiah, Moses, even Jesus did that. It is the consequence of understanding that things, history, peoples, churches are not a final, perfect product. We must always ‘protest’ any supposed finality in us or others, in life and organizations, before the 2nd coming.

The dream of and for perfection has also a Platonic element to it, which contradicts the core of Christianity. There is for us no absolute and static form somewhere, not even in heaven. The Trinity is in holy dynamic of love, etc. They created a good world also in materiality. Where the material world, including the body, space and time, sexuality and food and drink, work and money are suspect, understood to be a hindrance or a distracting temptation, the flaw is in our minds, not in the substances themselves. Our thinking must change, not the reality once made by God and by those who bear His image. We do not escape sin and frustration by denial, by seeking to abolish dependencies, by becoming more ‘angelic’ or floating ‘above’ the material world in a world of the spirit and the soul. These are ideas inherited from Greek thought, not Biblical thought. God created a real world and will one day make it whole again. This life is not a passing phase to gradually avoid in search of deepening spirituality.

Instead we should deal with temptation, dependencies, materialism through greater fidelity to what God’s Spirit has revealed through the Scriptures and by present power: sin as guilt starts in the mind, it is not present in creation. We must change our thoughts, our understanding, our priorities and our desires in the effort to put on the mind of Christ and then to seek rightness, not a spiritual escape.

These are some of the reasons why I do not believe that Foster’s “Spiritual Disciplines” is an accurate elaboration of Biblical insights. In my reading of it, it is born out of the Platonic influence on a particular political outlook. It describes ways to become independent of the material world, including our bodies, of the use of the mind, to fast from material needs and to become precisely ‘spiritual’ in a way that is not Biblical (though having been advocated in the church in every generation).

I admire the monasteries that brought justice and peace to the land, education, healthcare and economic development to people in regions torn by strife, war, rape, ignorance and poverty. That is far more in line with what God gave in the original mandates to Adam and Eve, to have dominion over the world and themselves , to add to creation knowledge (names of the animals) and love (as a couple equally made in God’s image) and children through sex to make more creatures in the image of God. After the fall the effort included healing what is broken and resisting evil. Never does it advocate the abandonment of the material world, the body or the active testimony as whole people to God in heaven. Adam became a living soul; he was not a body into which God poured a soul, which is now waiting to become independent of the material body.

I seek to give students a way to create a life, not to find a way to escape its frequent difficulties.

February 1 , 2010

It is an understandable that someone with little clue about the Biblical view of reality assumes that every claim to speak for God is true to who God is and how He sees things. Little wonder then that Richard Dawkins makes that mistake. He is too gullible when he accepts without discernment what some people, claiming special spiritual insight, propound as a judgment from God when catastrophes like the earthquake in Haiti occur. He seems to ignore that the Bible itself speaks of the danger of believing false prophets, lousy priests and spiritual charlatans.

It is also understandable that, faced with such enormous catastrophes and unfair life experiences like the Flood of Noah or the delay in the rescue of Nineveh due to Jonah’s tardy arrival, with the deaths of almost all people during the settling of the Promised Land (and other evidence, that significant choices by one generation bring about unmerited results into the next) Dawkins would be upset with anyone who just explains it all away with God’s judgment over sin.

Yet Dawkins cannot get away so easily. He also admits on some level that something is wrong with it all. He does not just accept it as natural, in the normal course of events, a statistical datum. In fact he has his own, obviously also biased view, when he accuses pastors to have a wrong view about it. He does not merely note it as a view ‘natural to pastors’. He objects against what he, in this case rightly, sees as an error and a deception.

But even nature does not come off without a complaint by Dawkins, who says that a catastrophe occurred as a result of ‘the bumping and grinding’ of two tectonic plates, interfering with human affairs and creating human misery. Dawkins here makes a moral statement, couched in scientific terms of “a force of nature”, obviously un-deliberate and therefore ‘sin-free, unpremeditated, unmotivated, supremely unconcerned’ with what to human beings, including Dawkins, are ‘human affairs and human misery.’

If nature and natural forces were all there was, one could not speak in moral terms. There would be no misery; at all times there would be simply a different appearance of the streets of Port-au-Prince, its dead and alive citizens from what was before. To justify the speech of moral upset one needs a moral framework, a recognition that things do not have to be the way they now are. One needs an explanation for the moral abnormality, when the framework of nature only reports what is natural.

Either Mr. Dawkins with his moral motions of describing a human misery is like a fish out of water, a misfit in a natural world of “just- and always-so”; or in fact he is on to something, when he realizes that there is a misery, calling for action, not just a notice.

That moral framework exists only in a personal universe of more than nature. People are more than nature, as we choose, create, deny or in other forms express our significance and moral judgments – about the misery on Haiti and the misery of flaky theology or corrupt government.

Any of these choices produce result with effects into a continuous future. Real significance, personal sovereignty, does not affect only us. That is why not all who died in the Flood were guilty of what decided God to punish people. In no war do only the guilty lose their life. Every child inherits the genes, the body, the world his or her parents helped to bring about by their choices. I appreciate the Bible’s view that there is no justice under the sun, that we all have more than we deserve and less. What happens on earth is precisely not justice, nor the will of God. We have to wait for that, and the conquest of Christ over death gives us hope that the insanity of a fallen world will one day be terminated.

When we recognize such significance of our actions, the account of the mess Adam and Eve created by their choice to walk away from God across all reality is the one possible explanation for the admission by Mr. Dawkins that there is something wrong that leads to the human and geographic misery. It also contains an idea of rationality and justice, including scientific rationality, from which we take our comparative basis for such a judgment.

Finally, if with our moral motions and laments about misery we are like fish out of water in a mere naturalist world, we should have the honesty of not feeling pity with the people of Haiti or anger with the mistaken pastors and brethren. In any case, such complaints as Mr. Dawkins is eagerly expressing are without significance, if he just has to say things which his ‘nature’ tells him to say.

Why respond as if he mattered? Mr. Dawkins cannot be anything but what his nature made him to be. I for one do not see things that way and can therefore have pity….on him and return his choice of words to him: What hypocrisy, Mr. Dawkins!

• Regarding Scott Roeder and the sentencing for murdur - January 30, 2010

After the sentencing for murder of Scott Roeder a few days ago, Francis Schaeffer’s book and video series Whatever Happened to the Human Race and A Christian Manifesto are cited as encouraging if not justifying such actions as the one now condemned as murder.

Earlier pieces published in The Huffington Post (I only access only when someone points me there. I have always been disappointed!), also suggested such connections.

If you look up relevant passages in A Christian Manifesto (Vol. 5, The Complete Works, pages 483 – 489) you find the following: Francis Schaeffer’s calls for any civil disobedience also frightens him, “because there are so many kooky people around” (488). He writes: “People are always irresponsible in a fallen world. But we live in a special time of irresponsible people, and such people will in their unbalanced way tend to do the very opposite from considering the appropriate means at the appropriate time and place. Anarchy is never appropriate.” On page 489 Schaeffer continues a quote with a reference to the American Declaration of Independence: “Whenever civil government becomes destructive of these rights, it is the right of the people to alter and abolish it and institute new government.” Schaeffer was always very much aware of the burden of unintended consequences and therefore spoke both for some civil and political actions, and tried to restrain other kinds of actions. Schaeffer was well aware of the temptation to “kooky people” to take the law into their own hands. He warned against anarchy, and is therefore not responsible for what this killer and others have done.

There is no call for vigilantism found in Schaeffer’s world, when other means are available.

The defiance towards a false and counterfeit state, which Schaeffer has in mind on page 483, takes the form of hiding Jews in Hitler’s realm. Schaeffer did not seek, did not accept and at all times tried to avoid becoming a front man or a driver of the religious right. While advocating political participation and moral justification, he was always the restrainer of the wild men out there.

He flew to Mr. Falwell to restrain him, not to put fuel into his fire. The same goes for Pat Robinson, Jim Kennedy or the crowd now gathered in Colorado Springs. He did not incite them to what they choose to do. He saw no necessary benefit from a government composed of only or even a majority of Christians; instead he taught and worked for lawful opposition, a changing of people’s minds and the renewal of government by a change of heart, mind and purpose by legitimate means.

The practical problem is that such “kooky people” and many of the non-hunting gun owners in the country do not in fact wish to take the law into their own hands (though that is what they claim). For, if they wanted to so that they would help make the law, follow and use it: before using their guns in their own sovereignty they would require two witnesses, a psychiatric examination of the trespassers to establish the degree of accountability, allow for a cooling-off period before reacting (modeled after the cities of refuge in the Old Testament and the preparation of the prosecution case in our modern procedural law), appoint a defense attorney and consider that the punishment must fit the crime, as well as reckon with a possible appeal process to a higher court. Is that not what we should always keep in mind when we are admonished to love our neighbor as ourselves?

No, the “kooky people” want to make their own law, shoot on sight; they are in fact the anarchists Schaeffer spoke against. They want to have the license to kill, maim and repel without law and proper accountability.

In my childhood, Mother resisted the wickedness of Nazi ideas for all 12 years, always insisted that her children have their own reason for doing things. She was surrounded by too many blind followers, ‘true believers’ as described by longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer. The excuse that someone else had taught or done it was null and void. For, each person is accountable for himself before God and history!

• Haiti - January 30, 2010

I was asked to respond to some of the simplified and in the end erroneous views stated in the media. He is what I wrote.

The assumption that God is behind all things happening, behind the earthquake in Haiti, Katrina’s destruction in New Orleans, and catastrophes as large as the Tsunami or as little as a household accident, is built on the view of a closed system universe.

There is an effect: therefore there must be a cause. True, but who or what is the cause?
If there is a single cause, there is no distinction between good and evil. If there are many possible causes, we do well to discern and oppose the destructive ones.

To blame historic Christianity’s God is not justified in light of Scripture and the person and life of Jesus. The Bible speaks of a world which now gives God grief, where people and nature are not "at peace," and where God interferes precisely because, as the Lord’s Prayer tells us, His will is not yet being done "on earth as it is in heaven." God sent prophets because what people did was in opposition to the will of God, not in concurrence with it.
Likewise, Jesus, who is God in the flesh and the exact image of the Father, does not walk about holding people’s hands in their misfortunes and accompany them through misery. Instead he aggressively opposes sickness, false teaching, vile government, and death itself.
Where other religions and secular philosophies start with the assumption of the normality of things and events, as sad as they are, God describes a sickening abnormality in his creation and acts, speaks, protests, and encourages us to do likewise.

There is no fatalism in Jewish and Christian teaching, though many times it seems to be in the language and explanations believers use to erroneously comfort themselves. There is the sound of false piety from what is in fact a total contradiction to what Jesus taught and did.
The faith and hope that God’s sovereignty is expressed in every event is something for the future.

For the time being, Haiti, Tsunami, Katrina, and your child falling out of a swing are things you should be upset about. We should not settle into acceptance, but rise for energetic and healing intervention to oppose, prevent and diminish each and recurrent tragedies.
For a more thorough development of these ideas you may want to consult my book The Innocence of God.